Deadfall: Survivors (21 page)

Then we played the waiting game, yet again. For the rest of that day, we scouted out the YMCA, trying to find anything useful in this building. This wasn’t your typical YMCA. It was located in
one of the really fancy places of the town, a really sleek shopping center, next to the REI. At one point in time, this place was super clean. Of course, now it was overgrown, and the lawns weren’t the nice trim green I remembered from a year ago. Garbage littered the ground, but it was old, flattened, sunned and discolored. There were a few cars still parked out in front, but near the entrance of the shopping area, a white van had been tipped over, blocking the entrance. Not sure what had happened there. We had just driven around it.

We avoided being close to the windows and as the sun went down, we retired deep into the building to avoid spilling any light out. Not only did we want to avoid any zombies
, but if that guy was anywhere nearby, we probably didn’t want to give ourselves away. We ate quietly, and found some cots and couches to sleep on. We moved them all into a room, barricaded the door and slept the night, splitting watches.

I was drinking water the next morning, really early, the sun just barely rising back behind me somewhere, just starting to reach the tips of the mountains to my west. I was on the second story, by a window at what I think was an office of some sort for the Y, and I could barely just see the mountains. I remember thinking, and I wrote this down at the time, I’d much rather be there.

What really had my attention there was a group of zombies. Down in front of us was one of those traffic circles, and beyond that, towards the west, was one of those nice downtown type avenues, with parking in the middle. Hard to describe I guess. It was really nice at one point. Now, it just had a bunch of cars that hadn’t been used in quite some time, BUT, were not empty. I had noticed that in at least three of the cars, possibly more, there were zombies on the inside. I couldn’t tell, but it almost seemed as if some were still in their seatbelts. Some were moving, and others were just sitting there, only moving once every few minutes. They had most likely been there for many months, maybe even since the beginning, and I just stood there, sipping on my water, wondering just how they had managed to die while sitting there, still strapped in.

“
It’s  brutally easy to die” was the thought I had.

Heather and I ducked out sometime later that morning, and snuck over to the REI store located just next to us. It was hopeful thinking,
and, as I had assumed, we didn’t find anything useful. These were the kind of stores that were ransacked almost from the get go. I'm sure the guns had been the first to go, but that good old desire to “run to the hills” when all hell breaks loose, probably had a vast majority of people looting their hiking and camping gear to see if they could run away into the mountains. I wonder just how many died without food, from hypothermia or from injuries up there in the mountains.

The place was a mess, but what
stuck out to me was a pile of bodies towards the back of the store. We couldn’t tell if they had been zombies, although they had all had their heads crushed, shot or smashed. Just something about the way the pile was there, just made me think that maybe they had been normal living humans before being shot. Made me wonder what kind of massacres occurred when people panicked and fought for their own survival. I can’t say what made me think that. I might be completely wrong, and they were already zombies. I can only hope that most people aren’t that horrible, but, from what I have seen and from stories such as Heather’s, it just seems like when it came down to it, people could be completely evil, if needed.

We all waited nervously that night for the communication between the two we were now hunting and we jumped when that radio cracked into life with their first transmission. Immediately, Tague had his locators running
, and I could tell from his eyes that something was up. He didn’t have his computer program, but instead, had a paper map with him. After figuring out the numbers (coordinates somehow?), he figured it out on the map and again looked at us, with wide eyes. He took one of the locators and changed something on it, and got a different reading from the device and looked at me.

“
Eight hundred feet southwest”.

He had whispered it as if someone would be able to hear us.

My guess was the hotel that we had talked about earlier. Hotels were easy places to survive against zombies; you could ignore rooms with them, or silently lock yourself in a room without them and be relatively safe. For us though, it would be a difficult task to find this guy out if he was in that hotel. We would have to go almost room to room, or, somehow put ourselves somewhere on the outside of the hotel to be able to see if he was there, and maybe get him when he came out of it. It would put us in a bad position outside of the hotel, and it also might make us more vulnerable to being discovered by this guy. We would have to place ourselves in different stores around the hotel and stay in touch by radio.

Of course, as usually happens, whatever I thought might happen certainly didn’t.
Here’s  how that morning went.

We got up extra early, divvied up the guns
, and did our best to sneak out of the YMCA. I mentioned to keep away from the cars with the zombies locked in them, as they might make noise and maybe draw more of them nearby. We paired up and then split up to head down to the hotel and get into our positions. Heather and I watched Aaron and Lucy head towards the movie theater, and Tague and Evan went to Barnes and Nobles across from the hotel. After watching them off, Heather and I went towards a small baby clothing shop. We had hoped that in these three spots, we could see anyone coming in or out.

But he had other ideas. Heather and I nearly ran into the man, dressed in the most unmilitary of clothing
; jeans and a t-shirt, just coming around the corner where our little shop was. It had appeared that he was also on the move, but we had figured it wrong. Instead of emerging from the hotel, he came around a completely different corner than we were expecting. For a brief moment, the three of us just stood there looking at each other. He then reached down, grabbed his radio and began to talk into it.

“Hey,
I’ve got live ones…”

I was carrying a pack with my gear in it on my arms instead of my back and at that moment, I swung it around, awkwardly hitting him across the body, enough to knock the radio out of his hand
, and make him stumble for a moment. Both of us were stunned for a moment, before I remembered what we had to do. I pulled out my gun and pointed it at him.

“Hey,
it’s ok man, I'm not here to hurt you.”

I told Heather to radio the other guys
, and they came rushing out a minute later while the guy just sat there, maybe a bit confused, or maybe planning on murdering us all with his bare hands. We would never find out. As he stood up, Evan came around the corner as well, knocking him out with a bat to the head. Tague exclaimed that he just might have killed him, but a quick check of his pulse showed that he was still alive.

The five minutes in which all of this had happened
had been more than enough to get the zombies that were locked up in the cars completely riled up, and I knew that if we didn’t leave here soon, or get into a building, that it was highly possible that we could get overrun. Aaron dashed down to get the truck, and drove it down to where we were, mentioning as we got in that he had seen some movement down one of the streets that we had taken into this area. Ideally, we would be rather safe inside the truck, but we could easily get trapped in there. We tied the guy up as best we could (not sure if any one of us was any kind of expert on tying people up), grabbed his gear, a bag and a backpack, and got in. Looking out of the back, I could see a dozen or more walking figures beginning to head down that avenue.

We had to wind down the small downtown like streets in order to backtrack our way out of that place
, but when we got to the interstate crossing, we realized our way back was going to require a detour. I do believe Evan made a joke about a parting of the red sea. The interstate was clogged with walking zombies out for an early morning stroll. They were even starting to fall off the side of the interstate overpass, when they first heard and then saw our truck pulling up. That just further gave proof to my theory that the more of them there were together, the more of a horde/frenzy state they were in.

Our detour got longer. We decided on heading south, instead of north, hoping we could avoid
having to head into Asheville. That plan didn’t work as well as it probably should have, or at least how we would have liked it to. The further south we went, the worse it got. There must have been a rather large horde moving north, because even the access streets, the streets and roads that came off the interstate, were full at times. We tried at the airport, but not only was that a mess of the dead, the overpasses were completely stuffed with overturned vehicles, making our passing impossible anyways. We weren’t about to step out to see if we could move anything.

We kept heading south, not exactly panicking, but starting to wonder if we were going to be stuck on this side of the interstate. We checked two more interstate exits, but again, they were full. We finally reached Hendersonville, the same town I had found these guys in
, and sighed in relief as we found out that at least here, it was clear enough to get across without having to run over too many of them. It was clear that this really had been a very large horde. The amount of zombies wandering these streets was much more than the usual random assortment we usually saw. We could only imagine that they had been pushed off of the interstate, as we had seen happen in overpasses before.

Once on the western side of the interstate, we began heading back north to get back to the house. We were so relieved with having been able to cross over
, that we had forgotten about our prisoner. I had been sitting in the back, along with Heather and Evan, the other three in the front of the truck. We had stuffed the guy at our feet and I could feel him stirring, and my first thought was that we might have a little bit of trouble on our hands. It was far more than that. Evan had killed him.

The blow to the head must have crushed his skull
, and while he was alive when we first checked, he must have died at some point during our little escape problems. We had all simply forgotten to check on him. I looked down, took one look into those eyes, and I knew at that moment that the guy had come back, and I screamed in what was probably a very embarrassing fashion, something I might have laughed at during some point, had this zombie not suddenly lurched up, attempting to eat me.

His hands and legs were still tied up, so he couldn’t stand up in there. Instead, he twisted himself around
, and was kicking and lunging, attempting to bite at my legs. I was shouting about the biter, and for a moment everyone else was a bit confused as to why I was jumping around. At that point I was up in my seat, which even in a full sized truck, is a very difficult thing to pull off. I think everyone finally understood that when I was yelling zombie, it meant inside the truck. Heather recoiled back into Evan, who was just trying to get Heather off him to see what was going on. I had one foot on the creatures back, trying to keep him down, while it kept twisting around in that limited space, trying to bite at the same foot. I kept screaming to stop the truck, and when Tague finally did, I had to scramble to open the door and jump out, while still keeping him down. Heather and Evan did the same on the other side, while Aaron, Lucy and Tague got out of the front.

We had stopped while still inside of Hendersonville
, and already the commotion was attracting some dead towards us, maybe five hundred feet away. The moment I got out, I stood there shaking for a moment, staring at the zombie still stuck twisting around on the floor of the cab, moaning and drooling. Then, I threw up. Evan pulled the zombie out by its feet on the other side of the truck, and Aaron would tell me later that both he and Evan bashed its skull in, completely this time.

I was still shaking as we got back into the truck. We couldn’t wait around for too long
, as the other zombies had begun to close in. Within a moment, we were driving again and after we left that spot a few miles behind, Evan suddenly burst out laughing. I was certainly in no laughing mood, and am pretty sure I dropped a few choice words in the supposed French language, or other sordid words of insult. Tague, ever the pragmatic, mentioned about how we really should have been more careful, and I’m  pretty sure I followed that up with a “no shit” comment.

That moment was the closest I had ever come to being attacked by a zombie. In the past
, I had always been very careful, on my own, cautious to a high degree, always keeping an eye on the dead, keeping them far, staying mobile. All this driving around had made me soft, had taken the edge off. With all the adrenaline wearing off, I would have thrown up more if I had  anything in my stomach. While there had been no harm done, and he was tied up, I didn’t  like having been in that position.

On the downside
, there was the fact that now we had lost our prisoner, our interrogation subject. We did have all of his gear, but there was no way of knowing if that would be of any use to us. As we talked about this, we decided to stay down off the mountains, at least for the remainder of the day, find a place to be safe and hidden at, and look through his things to see if we found anything else to go on. That way if we had to do anything down here near the city, we would already be here.