Get Off My L@wn - A Zombie Novel (2 page)

B
ack when the zombie apocalypse was fodder for
fiction, most writers painted a bleak and hopeless future for humankind. Given the
bug that actually hit us could spread indirectly by aerosol and contact (not
just fluid transfer) bleak and hopeless looked about right.

Fortunately, we got the classic “slow dumb”
zombie and not the lightning fast mutant ninja assassin zombies some fiction
described. Who ever said they were “slow” must never been chased by one, ten or
a thousand. They are not that slow.

What gave us hope from early on is that our
zombies eventually rot. Given enough time and the right environmental
conditions, their brainstems will eventually decay and detach. Waiting for that
to happen though can kill you. Our government based its strategy upon patience.
In the end, we would take back our country by concentrating on preserving life.
There would be no nuclear or chemical weapons on U.S. soil.

On a global level, hot wet already stinky places
like jungles were actually better off. The dead expired without help after less
than eight weeks of mayhem. Cold places, like here in Wisconsin, have the mixed
blessing of winter. The cold decreases their attention span. If you can hide,
the chance they will wander off increases as the temperature drops. However,
this benefit does not come without a significant downside. The cold extends the
creature’s shelf life indefinitely. In a deep freeze, they do not spoil at all.

Ironically, what were before the “best” places
to live offering moderate weather all year became the very picture of bleakness
described in the darkest of the pre-war books. On a personal note, I observe that
my ex-wife still lived near Silicon Valley when it was wiped out. She was
already a life-sucking bitch so things did not change that much for her.

On a local scale, on the scale of “up close and
personal,” on the scale of “we’re surrounded by miles of pus,” the theoretical advantages
offered by any particular locale did not amount to much. Pundits used to say,
“All politics is local.” I do not need to tell you, “All zombies are local.”
One ambulatory zombie at your back is one more than you need.

The plague spread around the globe within a few
weeks. Other writers can document in more detail how the international dominoes
fell. Our story is primarily about our own patch of ground.

Was the course of events predictable?
Absolutely.

If you have an Internet connection again, you
can download the 2009 paper by Munz, Hudea, Imad and Smith from:

http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/rsmith43/Zombies.pdf

Using basic modeling techniques, they came to the
following conclusion:

“An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to
be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the
undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is
unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans
surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only
sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in
eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.”

Initial reaction in the U.S. was laughable. In
those first few days we tweeted, “liked,” LOL’d and OMG’d the approaching
end-of-days. There was a seemingly non-stop stream of pictures with witty
captions. Americans grasped the full impact of what was happening later Wednesday
morning. The shocking video of dying National Guardsmen from the night before had
now been seen by every American with access to any media device.

Later in the day, the city that birthed the plague
became the first city in the world declared an uninhabitable military zone.
Losing a state capital, home to more than 250,000, stopped the idiotic meme
machine cold.

The news did not stop a different type of idiot:
ideologically driven lawyers.

The Federal Government attempted large-scale
mobilization on Friday (Day 9) but lawsuits seeking to stop or limit action
brought those efforts to a standstill. The far left wanted “to study the impact
on the rights of those affected.” The far right, who were convinced the liberal
leaning President finally had his pretext to take their guns away, insisted the
U.S. military could not be allowed to act within the United States under Posse
Comitatus laws. Fortunately, the well-regulated militia actually envisioned by
the framers, the National Guard, was not similarly impeded.

R
uth Ann and I discussed what our course of
action would be, as things got worse. From the start we figured we were better
off right here at home than facing the unknown of relocation. The neighborhood
Architectural Review Committee had whined that our house would look like a
bunker. We compromised by adding more curb appeal, but they were right. We
had
built a bunker.

We completed our contingency inventories. We
were already well supplied. Just the same, I charged my Amazon credit card up
to its credit limit on whatever survival supplies we felt we needed. With any
luck, the items would be here by Tuesday. Ruth Ann told me which bow supplies,
red dot, IR and laser optics to order for each weapon we owned. I bought
boatloads of uncommon battery types to complement the many dozens of standard
rechargeables we had, survival gear like food and hand tools, firearm-training
equipment (I did not have a clue) and many Kindle-based reference books. I figured
if UPS made it, great. If not, I would argue for a refund if we lived or Visa
would have a tough time collecting if we did not.

After lunch, we rounded up all the cash we had
on hand. Ruth Ann put her carbine in the car with spare ammo. There were two
mom-and-pop arms dealers within four miles of our house. Ah, Wisconsin! We
figured that the bigger dealers would run out of inventory first. Our intent
was to stock up on anything she found to augment our own supplies. We agreed
someone should remain at the house. That someone would be me as my weapons
knowledge extended no further than the Military Channel before it went all
reality TV.

As we opened the garage, we could see nothing
much out of the ordinary except for more kids than one would expect at this
time on a weekday. Our neighborhood had many young families so with schools
closed now across the state there were kids out playing. One thing that was odd
was every child had an active and watchful set of adult eyes on them. No child
was unsupervised. Neighbors talked together in driveways or backyards with eyes
locked on their kids.

“Hey Ruth Ann,” a woman Ruth Ann knew waved her
down.

“Hi Amanda, how are you?”

“Pissed off! I went to my yoga class this
morning and the damn place was closed. So I went for a latte at Starbucks and
it was closed too. I waited around a whole hour for my nail appointment and
they closed up shop while I was sitting there! I am not having a good day!”

“I’m sure it will get better Amanda, just give
it a chance.”

“It better. Emma’s school being closed is really
cramping my day. What am I supposed to do with my time, clean and cook?” Amanda
burst out laughing.

Ruth Ann feigned a giggle and made her good
byes.

On turning west onto US 12 Ruth Ann noticed a
little more traffic than usual made up of loaded family cars with suitcases and
such on roof racks. These stood out because we lived far off the path beaten by
FIPs (“Friendly” Illinois People) to their vacation homes. Folks from the Twin
Cities did not vacation much around here either. She stopped at the BP, topped
off the Volvo, and filled a pair of small gas cans. She said there were a
couple of cars waiting ahead of her for one of the four pumps. Having to wait
at all was a bit unusual.

There were a number of cars parked along 12 and
the side street at the gun shop. If they were having a sale, that wouldn’t be
unusual but they didn’t have sales even before the zombie apocalypse. The
little shop was quite crowded. Prices had gone up a lot too.

“Hey Freddie. The place is hopping,” Ruth Ann
said to the owner. “I haven’t seen this many people in here since never.”

“Yeah, been like this since Tuesday when the
Governor brought out the Guard in Dane County. There is nothing like a crisis
to pay for fixing my kid’s teeth. Orthodontia, there’s a criminal enterprise.”

“What’s with the prices Freddie, you’re
practically a war profiteer.”

“Supply and demand Ruth Ann. I didn’t invent it.
What do you need?”

“Need? I hope I don’t need anything. But what I
want is more ammo. What do you have left in .308 and .30? I want to have some
punch when I reach out and touch something.”

“I can let you have four boxes of .308 hollow
points, they make a big impression, and six boxes of .30 unless you want to
take a spam can off my hands.”

Ruth Ann looked at the price on the huge box of
.30 carbine rounds known as a “spam can” and whistled.

“I can’t afford that Freddy. I will take the
others. Can’t hook me up with more?”

“Ruth Ann, after I sell these to you I’m going
to raise the price another 20 percent. I’m just about out of these.”

“I appreciate the deal Freddie. Can you spare
some 38 Specials too? We can use it if things look grim.”

“Yeah, I can sell you four boxes. How are you fixed
for shotgun shells, I have a lot of 20 and 28 gauge left. Seems folks want more
punch.”

“I don’t have any shotguns.”

Freddie’s head notched back a tad in surprise.
He thought she was a native Badger. He changed the subject.

“So you going to stay in that bunker of yours?”

At this, a smelly man in hunter’s blaze orange
covers perked up, looking directly at Ruth Ann.

“Oh, Freddie, you know it’s not a bunker. I’m
hurt that you think so,” Ruth Ann said coyly.

She settled up and was on her way out
when she noticed the guy in orange talking with Freddie and pointing rather
obviously at her.

Ruth Ann came away with about half the ammo she
thought our money would buy. On the way back, Ruth Ann stopped at the BP again
and was surprisingly able to withdraw a modest amount from the ATM. She figured
we might need the cash later on, past when ATM machines ceased to function.
When she left, she thought she saw a guy in a pickup pull out onto 12.
He was wearing orange.

That night we started keeping our police scanner
on. I used to tell people that every family should have a scanner if only to
get a sense of how hard working and courageous their local law enforcement was.
Some disembodied voice tells a policewoman to investigate a report of shots
fired in the middle of a moonless night alone and her only answer might be,
“Four minutes out.” People just had no appreciation for how good they had it.

This night’s radio calls mostly centered upon
rotating vehicles into maintenance garages to pick up extra supplies and
equipment. There were also more than the usual amount of assisting distressed
motorists, traffic violations and accidents. It sounded more like a summer
Saturday night than an October Friday.

The news had finally gone O.J. over the virus.
It was now “all virus, all the time.” CNN reduced their commercials and put on
Wolf Blitzer to repeat the same stories over and over again hour after hour.
Wolf Blitzer is like the Jerry Lewis MDA telethon of bad news. If Wolf is on
screen for more than an hour, something is terribly wrong in
the world.

Metropolitan areas across the U.S. were showing
the beginning signs of a terminal spiral into chaos. The Feds were still
operating with an arm tied behind their backs. Use of the regular service
branches was still held up in court. Across the globe, however, U.S. assets
were heading home. Now we know what it takes to bring all the troops home.

Bases across the country were running on a war
footing and were feverishly, sorry - bad choice of words - hurriedly laying in
supplies and bulking up defenses.

Components of the Military Sealift Command and
Ready Reserve Fleet that weren’t already underway or prepositioned were being
loaded out around the clock. Ships that were prepositioned overseas were
steaming homeward. Efforts were underway to make ready lesser-used merchant
marine assets.

In retrospect, it is obvious that those in
charge of logistics and force disposition were showing a vote of no confidence
in a strategy focused on containing the infected. If outbreaks were expected to
be contained, it would mean that overland transport, perhaps agriculture and
some manufacturing might continue. Putting massive quantities of supplies out
to sea showed planners were preparing for the necessity to resupply through
extraordinary means, not through the usual channels. Clearly, some parts of the
Federal government were on top of their game.

O
n this day, Saturday (Day 10), we had a list of
things to do around the house. Our goal of remaining at home seemed realistic
because of its bunker-like construction. The exterior walls were made entirely
of poured reinforced concrete. Our living areas were on the second floor. Our
first floor had guest bedrooms, an office, laundry, main entry and a den. All
of the windows visible on the exterior of the first floor were facades; window
shutters covering concrete. Instead, natural lighting on the first floor came
from narrow horizontal strip windows high up.

Tough as our shell might have been, we figured
our survival also depended on stealth. Before we could enforce “light discipline”,
we needed to implement it. First, we spray painted all first floor glass black.
When that paint ran out, we switched to the kind used for weather proofing
outdoor furniture. We wadded much of our bed linens into the strip windows to
backstop the paint.

On the second floor, we began by closing the
shutters to match the fakes below. We saved our heavier fabrics for use
upstairs especially over the sliding glass door at the deck. These were stapled
in place with the exception of using Velcro at the deck door.