Deadfall: Survivors (30 page)

We traded some of our bread for some fresh vegetables, especially the tomatoes. We had
brought some dried vegetables with us from the house, but oh my, these fresh ones were great. The taste was simply amazing.

They made room for us up here, and while it’s a bit stale in here, and warm (this thing has been an oven all day), it’s oddly familiar to be surrounded by the living this time around.
There’s  a social comfort to it all. There were no sharing beds, the cots slept individuals only, but I spent an hour with Heather and her bed before I went to sleep, and we both shared in the amazement of finding this community, surviving amidst the hell that was the zombie infested world.

I kissed her good tonight.

Also, Mr. Hubs  made sure to point something out to me. He told us he would relay to the other towers that we were coming. Apparently, I was a sort of celebrity to the towers, being Richard’s son, I guess. Anyways, he cautioned me that, although my father had set up some basic rules, these rules only ensured their survival. Each tower was kind of on its own, as far as all other rules. He warned me that some of the towers, while probably friendly, would probably seem very bizarre. When I asked him for more details, he just said he’d let me see, that it wasn’t up to him to besmirch other towers.

Evan’s Notes: Brian never explains why, but he mentions how all the beds or cots have ropes or chains on them. Each person chains or ties himself to the bed at night
, before sleeping. It’s apparently a very important rule. If, for some reason, an individual died at night, their newly converted dead self wouldn’t be able to go on a rampage. There have been zero known instances of zombies untying knots or undoing chains.

Entry 45 – Each Little Fiefdom
[42]

It’s  been three days since we left Pittsboro. It’s  been like a whirlwind tour of the unreal.

Our initial plan had been to head straight for the water tower in Fayetteville
, to see if we could find more clues to the whereabouts of my father, but we kept getting stuck at other water towers. Well, stuck isn’t the right word. It was the fact that, as Mr. Hubs had said, these towers were like a collection of the unique. Each one was really its own little kingdom of sorts. Let me go through them here, just to point out the uniqueness, or as Heather said, the unreality, of it all.

Our first stop that first morning was at a water tower in Sanford, some ways south of Pittsboro. This was a larger water tower with an enclosed base, which added even more room to what was available. This one, according to the residents, had already had a large and tall chain link fence around it when they took it over. According to them, many of the newer water towers had fences around them before Deadfall anyways, making them good targets for conversion.

And let me get to the residents. My father met the “leader” of this tower on his way south out of Pittsboro, and together they had begun the conversion of that tower. My father had only stayed for five days before he left, but the basics were all set in.

The man called himself Colonel
Banders. Yes, sounds just like Colonel Sanders, the Kentucky Fried Chicken guy. He made a point of saying that, too. He was even attempting to grow out the equivalent facial hair. He seemed like a normal guy, except for the fact that he was the only male among all the residents. It was him and seventeen women.

It was truly a bizarre situation. They were all clearly very welcoming
, and none of the women gave even the barest hint that they were being forced to stay there, or that there was any abuse of any kind. In fact, it was quite the contrary. As some of them explained to us as we got the tour, it had been their decision to make this tower into their own backwards harem. See, according to them, the women held the power here, not Colonel Banders. His only duty was to bed one of the women every night, on a random order they had set up. I still remember his smile as they told us that tidbit, that worn out smile of someone who was tired, but loving every moment of it.

We stayed
for only  a few hours, until they confirmed they had sent further messages down the radio stations.

We ended up spending the night at another tower, just north of a town called Pinehurst. This was a more “normal” set of residents, just families that had banded together to survive. The original woman that had been helped by my father to start up the tower
, had died a month ago, but everyone spoke of what she had mentioned about my father. This tower was a large one, one of those very tall, white towers, shaped like a hot air balloon, smooth on the outside. Again, this one had a staircase on the inside and a very large fenced area, which the people had already converted to growing vegetables and crops. There were about thirteen families here, and some individuals as well, totaling a hundred and nine people. It was quite a substantial number, but they made it work inside of the tower. Again, nearly all of their time was spent outside of it, especially as the days grew warmer. They knew that the hottest days of the summer were going to pose a problem, but they were working on a solution.

They had managed to clear the pipes that had once brought water in and out of the tower, and were instead going to use that system as a natural ventilation system. They had vents cut out and installed on the top of the tower. The hot air inside would rise up to escape, pulling cooler air from deep within the water pipes deep underground. While it wasn’t air conditioning, it would help keep the tower livable, especially at night when they were inside sleeping.

On a side note, they had a rather large and interesting collection of golf carts, which they kept charged up by an impressive solar array they had bolted on to the top of the tower. They had salvaged solar arrays of all different sorts from construction sites, random utility poles along highways, and any house they found that had any.

It was here that evening
, while we ate and we exchanged our stories that we heard of two other towers I was glad we were not going to visit. To the west, near a town called Candor, a county water tower in the middle of nowhere had been converted by a bunch of women, and they only accepted women. You can only guess what they called themselves. South of us, between that tower and a town called Laurinburg, a group had taken residence, and they were all nudists. When I laughed at the incredulity of it all, they made it a clear point that they were not joking at all. It was as if the zombie apocalypse had allowed all these fringe minority groups to exist, without interference from the main population.

Day two had us headed east
, towards Fayetteville. On information that Pittsboro had received from the Sanford and Pinehurst towers, we had not taken the direct route into the former military town. According to them, the whole northern side of the town and military base had an excessively large zombie population that had not moved much. Even with vehicles, they warned, we would be walking into a death trap. It was far better to go all the way around the base, and come up from the south, which is the direction we were headed that day.

Two notable things occurred that day, both easily filling our daily recommended percentage of zombie encounters. First of all, after we had rounded the southern tip of the military base
, Fort Bragg, and were headed northeast up into Fayetteville, we came across a large number of military type vehicles along the side of the row, all lined up nicely. There were Humvees and larger trucks, as well. I had wanted to just go past them, but Evan insisted we stop and have a look. He just wanted to see if he could find any new toys.

We didn’t find anything useful, probably having been picked clean quite some time ago. We did manage to siphon out the remaining fuel in the vehicles, a lucky combination of gas in the smaller trucks
, and diesel in the larger ones. What did catch us completely by surprise was one of the last Humvees that we inspected. Inside of the trucks were two dead soldiers, doing what dead people do these days, trying to get at your flesh. They were still strapped in, and could only thrash at us as we walked by, quite easily spooking us at first. We stood there, just watching for a moment. Evan, Aaron and I talked for a moment, lamenting the poor existence of those men, who must have died somehow, still stuck in their trucks. We weren’t about to check how they had died, though.

What I hadn’t noticed was Heather coming up behind us, and completely scaring us
, as she screamed and speared the zombie in the driver’s seat cleanly through the head, splitting the poor creatures head like it was a jar of jelly. We then stood there, and watched in slight shock, as she proceeded to attempt to do the same to the other zombie, missing him repeatedly. She was still going through the driver’s side window, and the other zombie just kept thrashing about. She kept screaming at it, and I even noticed Aaron and Evan looking around, thinking what I was, as well.

I hope this didn’t draw out more of them.

Heather did finally manage to stab the last one, and when she turned around to face us, she had grabbed a torn piece of one of their uniforms, and was wiping  the guts and grime off the spear, when she looked me straight in the eyes and just smiled. She sighed heavily and said,

“That felt good.”

Then she walked off, leaving the three of us looking at each other, before rushing off after her to leave that place behind. She told me that night, when I asked her about it, that it had been her dream to find some soldier zombies that she would not feel guilty in killing. Some people take out their anger on punching bags. She took hers out on uniformed zombies. She really did feel relieved. It showed later that day, too.

We were only about
twenty miles from that location, coming up into the southern end of the city, when the van blew a tire. Thankfully, Aaron and Evan had picked up some spare tires on the trip that had gotten them the van. As we got out, and Tague and Aaron got to the task of changing the tire, we began to notice a few walkers heading towards us from across a parking lot.

“How long is it going to be guys
?” I remember Evan asking.

“At least
five minutes, but probably more,” one of them replied.

Evan was jumping into the back of the truck, ready to prime his new toy
, when Heather popped out of the back of the truck with a bunch of the spears.

“If he fires that thing, we
’re going to call every single one around who hasn’t seen us yet.”

She had a point. Even gun toting Evan had to agree with that
logic. So, we all grabbed a spear, and by my quick thinking (I’d like to think it was, but I’d  been thinking about this scenario for a very long time), we formed into nice, tight ranks. I tried to go into a whole historical spiel about the phalanx formation and its functions, but Heather just said “We got it.”

The point was to stay tight and keep the spears in front of us
, to not allow the zombies to get at us. We formed a semi circle, around the half of the van where the guys were working on the tire, while Lucy kept an eye out on the other side of the van. As they shambled slowly towards us, my heart felt like it was about to burst out through my throat. Evan said something, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was, couldn’t hear it over the throb of my heart pumping in my ears. He doesn’t remember what he said, either. Aaron shouted something about making sure we didn’t stab them in the body, and get them stuck on us.

The first one walked right up to us
, and Heather, as cool as could be, and I must say, much cooler than the rest of us, took a small step forward, and plunged the spear right through its head so hard that the spear split the head, and came out the top. The creature crumpled up, and fell into the small ditch we were next to. That was our slight advantage. The zombies had to come up the small ditch from the parking lot to where we were. As they came up, we somehow managed to keep our cool, and we cleanly took each one out. Lucy would call them out, and she even picked one that had come up behind us, to the left of the van. She then switched with Aaron, and she helped Tague finish off the tire swap.

We held our own, not easily, but without any fear. We were only beset by more than one at a time twice. Other than that, it was generally only one at a time, so we kept our calm. Often, two of us would stab at the same zombie. We had killed about thirty of them
, when Tague yelled out that he was done, and ready to go. As we threw the spears into the back of the van, we noticed that we had killed all the zombies in the parking lot in front of us, and although we saw some coming around the corner of the grocery store in front of us, it would take them a good five minutes to walk over here.

There was one zombie struggling to crawl up over his fallen dead
comrade, up the ditch and to us, but it kept stumbling and falling back. If it wasn’t for the fact that this was once a living human being, and that we were living in what was essentially a dead world for humans, this would have been a comical scene. A “youtube” moment, as Chris pointed out. Of course, that didn’t stop Evan from laughing.

Heather though, stepped out a bit, and speared the zombie through the top of the skull, putting an end to that moment.

We had all climbed back in to our respective vehicles, when ahead of us, we saw a guy on a motorcycle come peeling out from around a corner, and come driving straight towards us. We didn’t have time to think, before he pulled up right alongside us and motioned us to roll down the windows.

He took off his helmet and smiled.

“That was quite the show. We weren’t quite sure what to make of you guys.”

We didn’t have any
thing to say to him. He took the silence as his cue to continue talking.

“We got a radio message that you all might be coming through.
Sorry I didn’t come out sooner, but I would’ve  just attracted more shamblers. Looks like you all took care of yourselves, anyways.”

“
Where’s  your tower at?” asked Tague.

He mentioned that it was about two miles south of our present location, clearly not the tower we were headed to.

“Do you know about the tower on Cliffdale road?” Tague asked.

“Yeah, that’s who we got the message from. They told us to get to you first
, before heading into town. They’ve spotted a huge horde moving around the southern part of Fayetteville, and wanted you guys to stay out of the mess.”

We looked at each other, wondering whether to believe this guy or not. Then
, he cleared up our doubts.

“You are Richard’s son
, right?”

We followed him back to their tower. It was smaller than the one in Pinehurst, but of the same smooth curved style. It was
n’t, as they explained it, fully up and running yet. They hadn’t rebuilt the inside properly yet, but were working on it. Instead, it worked as an extension of the main tower in Fayetteville. The tower on Cliffdale, was a very large tower, that held many people, but had a very limited open space below it. That, and the fact that it was well within the city, meant that the original residents had opted to try to expand their range. Along with this tower, they had another tower outside of the city, on the eastern side. That one, they explained, was also large, but had a very large fenced in area they were converting to growing food. It was also on the other side of the Cape Fear River, and because of that, they were able to control their zombie population with more ease.