Deadfall: Survivors (22 page)

We kept driving west
, out of Hendersonville, until we crossed a small bridge over the French Broad, where it’s  still rather small, and found a fenced in public works type building just on the other side of it. The area was devoid of the dead, so we busted in the gate and maneuvered the truck right in front of the gate, just to be sure. From there, we would have a good view of any movement across the bridge and if needed, we could always escape along the river and cross it if needed. This was more of my type of thing.

I think I asked Evan to break a guy’s leg next time, instead of his skull.

We got into the little building and laid some of our gear out. Aaron broke out some food, tossing some of it around, offering drinks as well. Evan had gone outside to check on the fence all the way around the building, while Tague and Lucy began rummaging through the guy’s stuff. I found myself a chair, thankful there was one in here, and sat down, letting the sudden exhaustion set in. Heather looked concerned, and I was touched, but there was something else in her eyes. She would tell me later that evening that she had been so terrified that she hadn’t done anything to help me while in the truck. Finding her nobility charming, I could only laugh and point out that I, the man, had screamed like a girl, and had been the first one to jump out of the truck. If anything, I was the coward. Yes, I won her over that night by proclaiming my cowardice.

So
, this whole ordeal didn’t reveal too much to us. The guy had some food and traveling gear, but no smoking gun as to who he was, or what he knew. We checked his camera, but all it had was random pictures of different large buildings. The guy was looking for our house within the city, and seemingly had no idea that it was completely under a mountain, quite well hidden. Now, there were three DVDs with his gear, one of them had a slip of paper in it with this writing on it…

“Making inroads off the coast.”

Not much to go on, and at this point, we had no way of actually seeing what kind of media or data was on these DVDs, and wouldn’t be able to do so until we got back to the house.

That night we talked about heading back to the house the next day
, as well as there being a lot of fun being made of me and my screaming at the zombie ordeal. I can readily admit that if death wasn’t such a stark reality, that there was a macabre humor to the whole ordeal. I'm sure this wouldn’t be the last time I’d hear about this, especially from Evan. Tague, of course, talked about how we would deal with something like this in the future, which of course, everyone agreed to. I had a feeling nothing like this would happen again.

So, here we are, just a few days since we left. I began writing a bit in a journal that night
, but found my entry too disjointed. Well, added to that was Heather and her hands all over me that night, and that kept distracting me from my writing. Not to mention that zombie’s eyes looking up from me at the bottom of the truck’s floor. I had made him into a zombie.

That morning, I had expected us to just pack up and head back up the mountain, but apparently, Tague and Aaron had been talking some that past
evening, and had come up with what was, at the time, an incredibly stupid idea. They had somehow convinced themselves that it might be possible to find where these men were basing themselves at, and get our information from that location. They mentioned that they had heard the men talking about a possible base location at a “Black Mountain”. When asked if I knew where it was, I said no, but then realized they were just talking about Black Mountain, and not the base. I didn’t sleep too well that night.

Black Mountain is officially a small town just east of Asheville, heading up into the mountains along
I-40. It’s a nice little place, with a few hotels for highway traffic, but mostly just the people that live there. It was about an hour’s normal drive from here, which meant anywhere from an hour to a day of driving, depending on the traffic. Traffic of the dead, that is.

It was a rather small place, but as we talked about how to find this base of theirs, notwithstanding the fact that I think this is where their plan ended, it dawned on me that, in the days before the dead, there was a place perfectly suitable for a base of sorts. If it wasn’t overrun right now, the Ridgecrest Conference cen
ter. This place was a religious conference center, Baptist, I believe, of the sorts where these groups would hold their revivals or get togethers, or whatever it is that they did. I remember because I went there once with a girlfriend whose parents were avid churchgoers. We went there for some kind of youth rally. I mostly remember the amount of kids having sex after curfew.

Despite my memories of the hypocrisy, I do remember this place being that kind of ideal base location. It was set up higher than the rest of the
town, tons of rooms, cafeteria, and storage. Its only real downside was the fact that it was essentially right beside I-40. Now, I had only ever seen the massive interstate zombie hordes on I-26, but I could only assume that this phenomenon worked along other major paved arteries. But, the interstate itself was separated from that side access road by a wall of sorts, maybe creating a natural zombie-funnel (yet another zombie-word combo of mine). I would assume that anyone up there wouldn’t post a huge neon light on the front, and play Iron Maiden tunes at full blast, either.

Well, it made sense of sorts. I knew of a way up and around the mountains here that would get us there easily
, without going on the interstate or even near Asheville. It would also enable us to get out of the valley and up higher, less chance of running into the dead, at least in the numbers we seemed to be running into.

As we headed back through Hendersonville, the zombie population here had died out or moved on since
the previous day, but not enough for everyone to chime in with their favorite jokes about girly screams, mostly by Evan. We took Highway 64 east out of Hendersonville, and joined up with Highway 9. This would take us up past Chimney Rock, and back through the mountains behind Asheville, and drop us right into Black Mountain. But instead of just driving right into the place, we decided to take a small back road that led up to what was once a kid’s camp of some kind. With a small hike, we could get up to a summit, and hopefully have a good look at the conference center.

The drive was uneventful as I had hoped once we cleared Hendersonville. We did have to stop twice to move cars out of the way of the road, but mostly the roads were clear. The mountains had never
suffered like the cities, where the panic to leave left millions completely stuck in their vehicles, before being flooded by the dead that surged out. Up here instead, people had remained in their homes, only to leave when things had really come to an end. Where most people went after that, I cannot know. Maybe some, like me, just stayed up here and are still there. We certainly ran into no one, dead or alive.

We stopped for lunch on the highway, overlooking a valley the road dropped into. Below us was a tiny portion of Black Mountain, the interstate a small speck between two mountains. There was a Taco Bell down there
, which we could barely see, but from that point on, the conversation quickly turned to all the different kinds of food we missed. Among the different kinds; steak, fresh seafood, BBQ, burgers and even sushi, I don’t think anyone ever mentioned Taco Bell. Maybe it was the fact that we thought we had to miss the really good stuff, made us seem like better people, but I think that if we could have, at that very moment, have driven down there and ordered some burritos and a Pepsi; we would have gone in an instant.

It really was mostly
about those dumb things that we missed. Some stupid TV show about something completely impossible to believe in. Maybe we missed pictures of cats doing stupid things on the internet, or plugging in a heater in on a cold morning. Neither of those things was something we completely needed, but the sheer simplicity of it made us miss it even more. There was an odd nostalgic quiet (if that’s possible), as we all thought of what we missed most during that lunch. Might I add that we had tuna sandwiches? Just how many other people out there right now were having that?

We descended into the valley
, and took a sharp right turn that led up to that kids camp. The normal two lane road quickly turned into one of those tiny, barely a lane, mountain roads. There were plenty of small stone houses along the way, wonderfully isolated up here, in case we had to hide out somewhere. The road went past the camp a ways, and ended up in a dirt pathway that just stopped. We parked there, and had to hunt around to find the old trailhead that led to the top of this section. It probably hadn’t been hiked much back when there were plenty of people around, but with no one here now, it had easily grown in. After not finding anything, we just picked the path of least resistance and headed up.

Thankfully, the top wasn’t even a half a mile from where we park
ed, heavily wooded, which made going a little bit harder, but probably worked in our favor to keep us hidden. At this point we were still around three thousand feet, so it was still possible to run into a zombie. When we reached the top, we had a somewhat obstructed view of the interstate down below, so we had to scamper through some even thicker brush to reach a spot where we could see better. Down below was a small lake, probably the city reservoir. Immediately below though, behind us, was a house. We must have missed the dirt path to it, as well. Certainly something we would have to check out.

Once we had
a clear view, we used our binoculars to look down upon the conference center. During the time of the living, the center had this huge Christian cross up behind the main buildings, on the mountainside behind it. But at that moment, the right side of it had split off, leaving a huge pillar with a left protrusion sticking out. Hard to explain if you don’t know what a cross is. I guess it looked like a crooked Y.

I realized I had to try to explain a cross
, and I wondered just how religion, or at least the religions that we had with us before the dead arrived, would survive. I remember Dawn’s journal entry and her anger towards her religion, or her God, whichever it actually was. Would I have to be explaining what a cross is to my grandchildren someday? Of course, that means I’d have to have children of my own. Is it too much hopeful thinking to think this way? Would it seem foolish for me to even mention Heather in this same paragraph?

Back to what was going on.

We had a good view of the conference center from there, but there just wasn’t much we could see. Evan went back to the truck to get one of his rifle scopes, which he said had a far greater magnification than our binoculars, but that took him a good thirty minutes to do, which left the rest of us trying in vain to get a glimpse of something, of anything. It really dawned on us that we simply had no idea of what to look for, or what we hoped to find. We had come out this whole way to somehow get some good information about the group of living people, the first I had met in a while with any good sense of organization, a group of people who we thought wanted our house and were willing to kill for it, and here we were, mostly without a clue.

Evan returned with his scope to find us sitting there
, feeling useless. He went to work on his scope though, and immediately found out that there were certainly people there. A few “guards” as he called them, spotted at the top of the main building. Below that, the main grounds were empty, probably the safest thing to do. The interstate itself was also empty, but, we did notice that it was completely clear of vehicles of any sort. One thing about I-26 was that it was definitely littered with cars of all sorts.

As that day began to turn to dusk, we decided that we had better find
the house, and see if we could make it our own for the evening. We could then rest safely, and plan our next move.

The house itself had an odd stale smell to it, but was otherwise completely abandoned, if not completely preserved. Someone had left here and left things the way they were
, and had not returned. There was no food to be found, so it had all been taken with the owners. There were a couple of bedrooms, with beds,  mattresses and blankets. They could all probably use some washing, and I know everyone was shaking the sheets off to make sure no critters had taken permanent residence. The house was a strong stone house, with a nice big thick door, so after barricading it to be extra sure, we felt reasonably safe. We ate supper that night, and this time it was Tague’s turn to make fun…

“Everyone
ok? No bleeding? No broken skulls? I want to sleep tonight, and I don’t want Brian to scream too much.”

We kept the lights out just to be sure, so as the sun went down, we all retired to our respective rooms. Heather and I slept in a room on the first floor. She even attempted to make her own jokes at my zombie attack, but they came out rather flat. I knew she was trying to smile and let things go, but who
is ever really  able to let all those things go? Instead of jokes, we talked about life before the dead, and she was better at ease with that conversation than with anything afterwards. Not that I wish I was a shrink, but I wish I could do more. And not only because I’ve completely fallen for her, but simply because I wish I could help.

It’s not that I can cope so well with everything that has happened
; I'm sure I don’t. One only has to look at how I scream when attacked by a zombie, to know I'm just as lost as anyone. It’s just that I seem to have adapted easily with the death and chaos, the loss of human life on a scale that rivals the Old Testament. I guess that happens when you're just not that attached to the human world to begin with. Maybe things will get worse.