Deadfall: Hunters (14 page)

That morning, she woke up, and we were all gone. At first, she thought it was a joke, or that maybe we just went to the fort for breakfast. When she came up, she noticed one of the rowboats coming out to our ship, and thankfully, she got suspicious. She hid again, and watched as our translator and another man got up into our boat and started rummaging around. She watched them go through things, noticing that it was mostly the man doing it, while Emma was reading labels for him. Now, here is where things get murky. Janine didn’t explain it too clearly to me. See, she killed the man. She didn’t go into details, but at some point, the man got really close to her hiding spot, she stabbed him in the thigh and then cut his throat. Now, the first time she told me that, I laughed. I thought she was kidding. But you know what? She’s got ice in her veins. I don’t know exactly how she did it, but she did kill the man.

Janine got clearer with the next part though. She corralled the girl, Emma, and had it in her mind to kill her too, but then realized she needed to find out what had happened to us. She threatened her, and this is when the black girl confessed that she had been taken against her will as well. The only reason they had kept her free was because she knew English. She had learned it from American missionaries in a village up in the mountains south of Fort Liberte. She then told Janine what had happened to us, and where we were.

At this point, Janine said she still wanted to kill her. Glad she didn’t. I get we have to do things we don’t want, and she has been through a lot already, but just killing a lot, it can’t be good for you. Certainly can’t be good for a twelve year old girl.

The people in the fort, at least the legitimate ‘owners’ of the fort, really felt safe in their new home. That night, Janine, with Emma’s help, snuck into the fort. She claims that a few other people saw her, but did nothing, no alarms. She thinks these were also people they had taken prisoner. Janine told me later she really wanted to help them. She had been the prisoner once, but she didn’t have time though. She just wanted to get us out of there. She did agree though, to take Emma, in exchange for her help.

So thankfully for us, they were all idiots. They never noticed the guy who went out to the One Star Wonder missing. They kept us tied up really good, but the welded gates had flimsy locks, and everyone just went to bed. One swipe of Janine’s knife and we had gotten ourselves free. Our biggest difficulty was trying to convince Blevin not to go into revenge mode on the sleeping captors. I knew some of them had guns, and while our big man is incredible, I'm fairly certain a bullet or two would stop him. But, it really took some convincing. What we did do was put holes in all of their row boats. Granted, they had some other larger boats, but it felt satisfying. Now the whole time, I was expecting an alarm to be raised, shots to be fired, something, anything. Yet, as we climbed back into our boat, and Maxie hurried to get the sails up and Blevin pulled up the anchor, there was nothing. Not even any lights.

Oh, and we found the guy Janine had killed and tossed him over. She had also put her knife him through his brain, to be sure. It’s the only way we know that she did what she claimed she had. Stone cold.

Emma has led us back up north along the shore. We sailed most of the night, before pulling into a small cay in some swampy coastal areas. We were all worried they would just come after us, but Emma insisted that, while they did have motor boats, they didn’t have much gas, and didn’t know the area as well as they thought they did. Besides, they’d think we had just left Haiti all together.

So do I trust her? At this point, we are, mostly because she says she can take us to this Abraham. She found us a really nice spot to leave the ship, and I can see how no one might find it, at least not by looking out from the sea. It’s a tangled mess of trees, the kind that have the big long roots sticking into the water. Maxie was only able to get the boat into that mess with Emma’s help.

We’ve been walking for almost a day through a completely desolate countryside. We are headed to the mountains we could see clearly for most of the day. We stopped early this afternoon. We had been awake all night and then had walked for eight hours. We are exhausted. I took the time to write all of this up, but only because I offered to do the first watch.

Tomorrow we head up into the mountains. Emma claims we can be there in two days. And then maybe we might get some answers. Problem is, I don’t even know what the questions are.

Hey, at least I'm hiking up a mountain.

This morning I woke up and I was in a fantastic mood. The best mood I’ve been in in a very long time. It was really odd, and not just because we lived in a post-apocalyptic world where zombies wanted to tear us apart, but because of the events of the past couple of days. The floating boat island of death and depression and the scumbbaggy dudes at the fort had really pissed me off.

BUT NO.

I woke up this morning ready to go. Nearly all of the best memories of my life are of hiking. I’m sure I’ve ranted about it many times over before, but it’s so true. The week before a long hike was usually the best work wise, because I was in a good mood. I can’t remember a single hike, either a day long or ten days long, where I was in a bad mood. I can remember many disasters, and many things going wrong on all the hikes I’ve taken, and yet, my mood was always fantastic. Just the thought of hiking up a mountain and the worries of a zombie filled world just vanished.

That lasted all of ten minutes. I was prancing along all gung-ho, headed towards the small trail that Emma was leading us up on and the skies opened up. No big deal, I’ve hiked in rain before. Well, it rained on and off all day, usually only ten minutes at a time. And it was a hurricane every time it rained too. Torrents of water each time. Then, the twenty or so minutes it wasn’t raining, I was being assaulted by all sorts of insects I didn’t even know existed. It wasn’t just mosquitoes either, it was other things. Most likely, mutated zombie mosquitoes. Nothing could explain the bloodthirst those creatures had. I felt like a one-man band, slapping myself with a certain savage rhythm. This was certainly not North Carolina.

It was a whole different environment. Yeah, it was the tropics, and everything was so different. The trees were so, leafy and everything was so green. Everywhere. Vines and thick vegetation were everywhere. I’m not even sure how Emma knew where the trail was. Most of the time, as I was walking it, I’d look down and I wouldn’t see the trail myself. Add in the ten minute monsoons where you couldn’t see anything if it was a shopping center parking lot and I just got tired of it fast. I’m not sure if I was thankful that we were off that trail after only an hour and a half. If the invisible trail and rain hadn’t been enough to destroy the illusion, Emma’s announcement that the rest of the ‘hike’ would be on dirt roads completely finished it.

Looking back, it made sense. This was a completely different country. I hardly think that recreational hiking was a national pastime in a country where the vast majority of the population listed surviving as their number one pastime. There weren’t going to be any wonderful nature trails where hundreds or thousands of people came to on the weekends to enjoy the outdoors. Most of the people here ‘lived’ in the outdoors. They didn’t have time for nature trails. They needed roads.

Emma told us it would take us two days to get to the village where this Abraham guy was, depending on the rain. The rain really was a downer. I think I spent the whole morning just getting soaked, then dried out, and over and over again. I felt like a shower mat. I also believe that is all I thought about the whole morning. We stopped around lunch that first day at a tiny little village, with something like four houses, all abandoned. It was a miracle they were still standing. Only nice thing about it was being able to take a small break from being drenched. I think my lunch tasted like rain.

From that little town, we took another road, dirt as well, back up the other way as we went higher up the mountain range. I do think that it at least didn’t rain for almost two hours right after we left. Of course, the rain was replaced with muggy heat. There were enough trees along the side of the road though, where we walked at ninety-nine percent of the time.

Back in North Carolina, and elsewhere too maybe, people came up with unique ways to survive the zombies. They had their water tower towns where they could be safe from the hordes. The people here, at least in this area, had come up with their own unique way of protecting themselves from the dead. The zombie siren signal…thing. The first one I saw came out of the blue. I was walking along, next to the edge of the road where the shade was and nearly missed it among the trees. It didn’t even moan and it wasn’t till I was nearly next to it did Tague point it out. Zombie on a stick. I jumped back twenty feet. Slight exaggeration to make a point.

The Haitians had taken to capturing zombie stragglers and sticking them on pikes along the road. These, Emma explained, would struggle some, but would eventually realize they were stuck, and go into a sleep mode. Conserving energy, Tague pointed out, bringing up many of the theories we had spoken about many times before. Now, these zombies on a stick main purpose was to let travelers along these roads know if other zombies were nearby. You just saw how the zombie was reacting and you would know if there were other nearby, or if it was really full of energy, maybe there was a horde nearby. As long as they were mostly silent and you didn’t intentionally put your own flesh in its claws then you were fine and could keep traveling. The further we went up that road, the more of these warning systems we found. Sometimes, every one hundred feet, and other times, just one a mile. But they seemed to work as intended.

Tague and I talked a lot about this, at least when it wasn’t raining. It was really an oddly good system, but we came to the conclusion that it would never work in the USA. It was clear, well, at least it was that day, that it did work, but no one in the states would allow us to stake them on pikes all over the countryside. Imagine using this around a perimeter in your water tower town. It would work amazingly. I just don’t think that anyone would be comfortable with having former human beings stuck on spikes.

It’s still hard to deal with it. To this day, when I am going to cut off one of their heads, I have to get myself into certain, mental aspect. Nearly every time I have come across a single zombie and it is clear that I could have cut it down, but I’m completely safe, I don’t do it. I can really only think of one person that, if I found them ambling along moaning and groaning, would I even think about hacking their head off. And I can’t answer that until it happens, and I hope it doesn’t. Blevin has told me he just thinks of them as rabid animals, which has an element of truth to it. Janine, well, I think her hatred for human beings in general makes it that much easier to kill zombies. Aaron and Lucy had zombies to blame for the death of their families. They had mentioned many times before this was the only way they were able to kill them. Tague said it had been nearly impossible at first and that it had taken time to kind of drown out to the thought the zombies you were dispatching had once been living human beings.

It always made me wonder if that’s really how most of humanity fell. Yeah, it was zombies tearing their flesh off with their mouths and hands that caused the death of humanity, but, we knew how they really fell. A single zombie wasn’t really a threat. They were slow and dumb. We weren’t talking about kung fu samurai zombies. The problem I think, was that it was almost impossible to hack the head off of your wife as she’s coming at you. I’m not a parent, but I can’t see either parent killing its zombie child and much more less, a child doing, or being able to do, anything against their parent. How many millions died without being able to react from the shock of seeing someone they loved coming at them, baring their teeth.

And just how many people would be able to react calmly as random strangers, now zombies, came at them? Even if you had a gun, and knew how to use it proficiently, would you be able to survive? I just don’t think it was possible to even be ready for something like this. Hell, I don’t think it’s possible to be ready for nearly everything drastically wrong that happens in life. Build a cellar and when a tornado comes and wrecks your neighborhood, you’re still a mess. After so many hurricanes hitting the shores of America, it’s like a slap in the face when we see the results. You know what’s coming but it just doesn’t matter. And that’s for things that have happened before. No one had any clue on how to react to a zombie plague brought upon by a space borne biological agent that was riding on a comet we destroyed before it hit earth.

That makes me think. Tague had this theory once. So supposedly, there was this huge asteroid or something that hit our planet some 65 million years ago and that supposedly that killed off the dinosaurs. Now, what if instead of the dinosaurs dying from the asteroid itself, they actually died because that space rock also brought the zombie bug with it and that instead, zombie dinos killed all of the other dinos. Yeah, it’s kind of a wacky theory, just one of those odd things we come up with.

It rained most of the rest of that afternoon. We followed that road up, now a muddy river, until it dipped down again into a smaller valley higher up in the mountains. There we came across a tiny village, as if there were any other kinds of villages here. We reached it about an hour before dusk, greeted at the entrance by another silent zombie on a stick. That is all we needed to take safe residence in a small brick building. A small stream cascaded over large river rocks behind the building. The rain had swelled the flow of water, so we had to be a bit careful getting water out, making sure not to slip while dipping buckets in to get the water. After that long day though, sitting there dishing water out of that stream, I was lost in a few memories from other streams I had camped by.

Apparently, that building we were staying in was used for this purpose many times in the past. There was a wooden stove there and loads of wood for us to use. We spent a little time that night replenishing the wood we used as well. It was all very quaint, heating our food over a wood stove. The smell of smoke wafting through the building, and although the heat wasn’t really needed that night, there was still something safe to sleeping near a fire. Other than the zombies on a stick, we hadn’t seen a single dead walker that day. There was something settling to that. We had walked all day and were exhausted. I had planned on writing in my journal that night, but instead found myself drawn into talking with everyone else.

Wooden cots lined up the walls in the room with the fire, and two large wooden doors had slots in it to bar them from the inside. We had plenty of water and had eaten well and it didn’t take long for the stories to start flowing. The majority of it was us telling Emma about our adventures, while keeping certain secret events out of the story. Then it came time for her to tell us hers. I hope I got all the important parts right as I retell it here.

Emma is, or was, one of five kids. Father worked with the local government, helped maintain roads and whatnot. I’m not sure how someone maintains dirt roads, but I wasn’t about to ask. Emma didn’t have much regard for her father it seemed. She made it clear to mention that he was an alcoholic and that he had kids with many other women. She didn’t really mention her mother, but she went into some detail about her siblings. I could tell she was hesitant, and never even gave their names. Turns out, she never saw them again after Deadfall.

Haitians weren’t among the elite in this world that had all sort of measures in place to survive the imminent comet strike. When the general populace on the island found out about the impending doom, it was one of many smaller and poorer countries to just fall apart. Looting and rioting spread like wildfire in the main cities and those lucky or smart enough fled to the hills and the smaller villages. Her mother had sent her to her grandmother’s house to see if it was a viable place to wait for the comet, but when she returned, her mother and siblings were already gone. Without any place to go to, she went back to her grandmother in the mountain village and waited. At least, she was safe from the violent gangs and looters. Then of course, the comet had been destroyed. The country was a mess. Whatever military was left in the small island nation attempted to restore order and a new dictator quickly rose to power. It was the shortest reign in Haitian history. A month later, the dead started walking.

The looting and rioting didn’t stop with the destruction of the comet. The clashes between whatever could be called the military, the police, the armed gangs and everyone in between was bitter during that month. What they didn’t realize was that they were creating an army. When the zombies starting coming to life one by one in the USA, in Haiti hey had already mass produced their own horde. Emma didn’t witness anything in the bigger cities, but she heard enough. The fighting between the military and everyone else further added to the confusion, and the dead had their way easily within the cities. The chaos was immediate and the destruction of life was complete.

Emma first ran into a zombie when she was headed down a dirt road (as if there were any other kind) with some other people in her grandmother’s village when they came to a crossroads. It had been the sight of a clash between gangs, or military, or everyone combined. As they drove past the old rotting corpses in their beat down pickup truck, someone shouted out that there were survivors. They stopped the truck and got out to help the person they saw moving on the ground. Harmless thought of course. I could see myself having done that. It was a zombie, but the villagers watched in horror as this ‘person’ started tearing at their fellow villager. Within moments, other bodies began writhing, and you can guess the result. Emma could only say that in the panic, she managed to get herself back on the pickup and the driver tore out of that crossroads with only one other man.

Emma’s grandmother’s village was overrun the next week, but this time she was ready and fled with her grandmother higher up into the tropical mountains. They knew of a missionary compound up in one of the higher up villages. There were Americans there. Certainly, they knew what to do.