Deadfall: Hunters (17 page)

I woke up just before noon, I think, filthy, thirsty and starving. I took a several large cups of water and downed them all and went out to the edge. Sarah joined me there. The third group was still out there, but there hadn’t been any new zombies in a few hours. In the meantime, many other villagers had come out to help. They had come up with a really good idea. Every single one of the zombies had come up from that southern road, so they began stacking the bodies of the zombies into a makeshift wall right along the road. There were at least a hundred bodies there now. They actually made a decent barrier.

Sarah and I went over everything from the past night. There were a lot of things that were a little different from what I knew of zombies. The fact that we had to entice towards us was the weirdest thing. We went walking out towards the tree they all seemed attracted to. It was an enormous tree. Sarah said it was a breadfruit tree. The leaves were gigantic. It was a very tall tree with a thick trunk. Big football sized fruit hung from it all throughout the tree. Otherwise, it was just a tree, which, according to Sarah, was common throughout the island. As I touched the trunk, it felt just like one. It wasn’t until I took my hand off and looked at the hand that I realized what was going on.

My hand was coated in a silvery dust.

I wiped that stuff off on my pants, then the grass and dirt, as quickly as possible. Only Tague and I knew about Black Mountain and what had happened there, so as we told Sarah about it, Blevin, and Janine heard about it for the first time. The room with the laptop and all the gear and the explosion and all the silvery dust, we told them all about it. We didn’t know what it was, although we had a reference to a substance called Ionatite. Not that it really mattered, as that still didn’t tell us what it was. What we did know now though, at least we thought we knew, was that this stuff was a zombie magnet.

Made me wonder about Carolina Beach.

In either case, in the both places we found this stuff, they were overrun by zombies. In Black Mountain, with a nice interstate highway zombie-road, they came there quickly and in greater numbers. Out here in Haiti, the dirt roads made it harder for them to come, but they were coming. We hadn’t stayed behind in Black Mountain to find out if they ever left. We had no way of knowing if the effect of this stuff would last a day or a year. We had to try something.

First squad came back out around three, I think it was, and just in time, because the third group was completely tired and worn out. Thankfully, the wall of zombies was actually helping. It was rather creepy though, looking out from our little headquarter house at the edge of the village at this fifty foot long mound of bodies. What a world we live in.

While the first group was on duty, and just as quickly, busy with what was slowly turning into a steady stream of zombies now, we tried to see what could be done about the silver dust. First we had buckets of water out there by the tree, and tried just throwing them, one bucket-full at a time, at the tree. Well, we did that for about ten minutes, with a steady stream of villagers brining us water in any container they could find. The water though, was just beading off the stuff. We gave that up. Funny thing is, as we talked about it later, if it had washed off, then it would have just gone into the ground and it may have made matters worse.

Oh well.

So then we tried scrubbing at the tree with rags and brushes. I can only imagine it looked ridiculous, adults scrubbing at a tree when zombies are trying to walk at it just fifteen feet away. That didn’t work either. I have no idea what this stuff is, but we just scrubbed and scrubbed and you could easily see the stuff coming off on the rags, and yet, there it was on the tree trunk. It was unreal. I was getting cramps on my arms and hands from scrubbing so hard, not to forget the bruising on our hands from the rough bark. So here we are, essentially spreading the dust out even further with piles of filthy contaminated rags all over, and still nothing done with the tree. It had been two hours since we started with this cleaning job, and we still didn’t have a solution.

I took a break as the cleanup crew went to work on their next idea, burning the stuff off. Our first fighting group was still out there, and they were busy. I watched as each member methodically ran a spear through a zombie’s head, took a step back, and looked for its next target. It had become monotonous work. Thankfully, at least for the time being, it was not dangerous. I could only hope that the stream of undead would stay as it was. I did see one guy trip over a body, fall forward and have its spear just plunge clean through a zombie’s chest. The guy fell right onto the zombie, which grabbed on to the helpless guy. He on the other hand, could do all he could just to keep the beast’s mouth from clomping down on him. At the same time, the creature’s hands just dug into the man. He screamed and for a moment, no one did anything. It had become so boring that they just stood there struck on either killing the next zombie or watching in stunned curiosity. I dashed forward, grabbing a spear, and wedged it in between the two. I pulled hard enough to separate them just as another of his fellow villagers pierced the walker’s head, dropping it in a heap.

The man stood there stunned, bleeding all over, but overall fine. Then, in the finest example of either bravery, badassness or stubbornness, he reached for another spear. He stood up, wiped his face, which did nothing for any of the mess, and waited for the next zombie. He had gone from screaming for his life to somber silence. It was like a scene straight out of a factory assembly line.

At that point, I had to take a break. I let everyone know and went back into the village, found the first seat I could, and collapsed into it. It doesn’t happen often, but at that moment, I was sound asleep in seconds.

I woke up when I slid off the chair. I probably hadn’t slept but twenty minutes, if that, but other than a bruised ego from falling off the chair, I felt great. So as I stood up and looked back out towards the south, I couldn’t help but notice the smoke. They had started plan number three.

When I got back out there though, I wasn’t quite sure what they were trying to do. They had a large fire burning right next to the tree, but not right on it. They were trying to burn the dust off without actually burning down the tree. As I stood next to the unbearably hot fire, it was clear the heat itself wasn’t doing anything to the dust itself. The cleanup crew could see that as well, and they were already in the talks to push the fire into the tree itself and just burn it all. At that point, I remembered about washing the dust off into the ground, and thought that perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to just turn all of the dust into ash. If it didn’t stop its effects, it would be in the ground as well but, at that point, my attention was turned somewhere else.

I can’t remember who it was that came shouting for us, but the message was clear. Zombies were starting to straggle in from the north east. There was a smaller road that came in from that direction, but it came up and over a mountain miles to the north and we hadn’t see any zombies come from there, so we had basically ignored it. I should not have, though. In Black Mountain, yeah, they came from the interstate, mostly, but plenty came from all directions. They’re going to take the simplest way up here, but it’s not like they had maps or a GPS navigator. If that dust was calling out to them, they would come from wherever they were.

For the entire time up to that point, our threat had been directly in front of us, and despite the numbers, easily controllable. The initial panic the villagers had worked themselves into when the first zombies showed up had subsided. As Blevin and I ran back through the village, though, they had already worked themselves up again. It was one thing to have your danger right in front of you, but the moment you get surrounded, things get hairy.

It was just one solitary zombie, and three women had already beaten it to a twitching pulp as we came up to it. Blevin made a big show of pointing at the head, the only part of the body still recognizable, and crushed it under his boot. The twitching stopped, making his point clear. He pointed at his boot, then at the oozing mass of skull and flesh, again, to make his point.

We had to setup roving patrols then, and that was the point we began to start running out of villagers, so we had to employ the older kids to keep running about the edge of the village to scout out for more walkers. Most acted brave, but were visibly shaken when hugging their parents before dashing off. The rest of the villagers we asked to stay within the center plaza and not wander off. If things became difficult, we would collapse into the plaza and either make our stand there, if it was really bad, or make a run for the woods. In the meantime, those remaining villagers began working on barricades for the plaza, just in case it turned into The Alamo.

Gladly, no one there understood my reference.

The sun was already well down past the mountain and quickly heading towards darkness when I came back to the south of the village. I was greeted there by a gigantic bonfire, lighting up the sky and nearby trees, as well as all of the zombies as they came ambling out of the woods. They had cut the tree down and had cut up the majority of its trunk, at least the part that had been, dusted. They had heaped the trunk sections into the fire that they were feeding with brush and dead wood. I thought about rushing forward to say that might not be a good idea, but it really was too late. As I came up to Sarah, standing twenty feet off from the fire, she was looking up at the plume of smoke that rose steadily into the dark night.

“What if the dust goes up with the smoke?”

Might be a good thing, or a bad thing.

Or nothing.

Just twenty feet from that fire and I had to turn my face away. I can still feel the heat.

Last night was even worse. Everyone was tired. No one knew if the fire had worked because the zombies kept coming. Steady, as usual, but now, everyone was just that more tired, worried and stressed. We lost a man last night too, and the only thing I can say is that I’m thankful the guy didn’t die out there with the rest. In the dark, with everyone tired, someone forgot to notice a zombie or two, and the guy got attacked and nearly gutted before anyone realized what was going on. Blevin, who was up at the time, got him off of the field quickly. Sarah said he died before he made it to the hospital, not that it would have mattered. The village found out about it later on, sometime this morning, just before it all very nearly fell apart.

And that didn’t help.

The village was stressed to a breaking point by mid-morning, but had not broken. I can’t quite explain it, but at some point, the chaos stopped being just that. The zombies kept coming, from all directions but still mostly from the southern road, but everything was under control. The men fighting the zombies on the road had really figured it out. They were tired but not exhausted. They had really figured out a system, and order, and were taking care of it. They had used the bodies and added on to the wall branching out from either end to create a funnel. The middle of the zombie body wall had been knocked down to allow the creatures to funnel in at a much slower rate. Like herding cattle to the slaughter. It was all business like out there. I was pleasantly surprised.

To the side lay the smoldering remains of the tree. It was still too hot to handle, as I found out while kicking through the embers. I was trying to find any remnants of the dust, but it was pointless. Sarah joined me there, and that’s when she told me about the fellow dying the night before. As sad as that was, it was good to hear that the man was the only casualty. Even though more and more zombies kept coming at the village, it really felt like things were under control now.

Then thunder struck.

The crack rang out clear as day. A gunshot. Really close by. I inadvertently grabbed Sarah as I dove for the ground, landing on her arm with a loud crunch. I looked up quick to see the confusion among the men still working on the zombies. One of the men was crouched over his fellow villager. I could see blood soaking through his shirt. It was bright red against his white, if dirty, shirt. Looking back towards the city, I saw Tague emerge from the HQ house with an equally alarmed look on his face.

When the second shot rang, everyone broke into a run. I never knew if anyone was hit by the third shot because I was too busy running. I pushed Sarah into the house just as I ran in. Tague had his gun, but he produced a second one out of somewhere and gave it to me. Blevin and Janine were nowhere I could see at the time. I peered out of the window and already, the zombies were slowly starting to make their way towards the village. I could see the body of one of the shot men, his legs sticking out from where the zombies had collapsed on him. Another shot fired off into the village, pelting the wall of our house. I ducked behind the window in a hurry.

“What now?” I yelled.

Tague said they were walking with the zombies. He said it had taken him a bit to spot them, but he had found them. They didn’t quite walk like the undead, but close enough. They of course, clearly gave themselves up when they fired their shots.

I peeked up and looked through the window again scanning back and forth between the walkers as they got closer. It was the color of their skin that gave them away. I spotted two of them almost immediately. Their skin was normal looking, although that’s kind of hard to explain. There was just something, off, about zombies. Their skin had a whitish, greenish hue to them. They were walking like the zombies though, slowly, stumbling about. But the biggest thing about it all was the fact that the zombies were just ignoring them.