No Easy Hope - 01 (2 page)

I brought my small sword up and drove the point through the undead’s eye, giving the blade a practiced twist as it went in. When I felt the blade hit the backside of the creature’s skull I quickly drew the sword back. As I did so, I covered my face with my arm to avoid getting infected tissue splattered on me. The corpse shuddered, then collapsed to the ground. I reached under the lowest rail in the fence, and pulled on the feet of the now permanently dead police officer.

“What’re you doin’?” Gabe asked.

“He’s still got his duty belt on. I want to see if there’s anything useful on it.” I replied.

Gabe reached down and helped me pull the body closer to the fence. We dragged it close enough for me to reach between the rails and unbuckle the duty belt. After some tugging and cursing on my part, I finally managed to rip it free and pull it off the corpse.

I stood up and looked over the belt. The expandable baton was still in its sheath, as well as a rusted can of pepper spray. The holsters for handcuffs, a radio, and a taser were all empty. The gun was still in the holster. I recognized it as a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol with a magazine in it, and two more magazines in holsters on the backside of the belt.

“Well I’ll be damned.” I said. “Look what we got here.” I held up the belt for Gabe to see. “Reckon we could get this stuff cleaned up and usable?” I asked.

“Probably so. That’s a good find. Guns and ammo are getting pretty hard to come by these days.” Gabe replied.

I nodded in agreement. A serviceable pistol and forty-five rounds of ammo was more than we had scored on our last two scouting trips. I stepped behind Gabe and put the duty belt in his pack.

“I tell you what man, I’m sure as hell glad we took the time to finish this fence.” I rapped on a fence post with the back of my knuckles, making a hollow ringing sound with each strike. “This thing makes life a hell of a lot easier up here.”

“Damn straight.” Gabe agreed. “We might have spent half the day tracking this asshole and his buddies if we didn’t have a good perimeter to work from.”

Not long after I made it up here, Gabe and I loaded a gasoline powered generator and an arc welder into the back of my truck, and set about finishing the fence. The rails are made of hollow lengths of heavy gauge galvanized steel bars. It took Gabe and I the better part of eight weeks to finish the fence. It is forty yards square, and has a small gate on the west side that leads out to a sheer four hundred foot cliff. The cliff comprises the entire western face of the mountain that we live on. The larger main gate is on the east side of the fence. Gabe installed the steel posts that support the fence the year before the outbreak started, but did not get a chance to finish it before the apocalypse struck.

The rest of the patrol passed without incident. Gabe and I were in high spirits due to the good fortune of finding the dead policeman’s gear. Life had been difficult for us over the past few months, and any stroke of good luck was welcome.

After we finished patrolling, we retrieved a makeshift sled from behind Gabe’s log cabin and loaded the dead body closest to the perimeter fence onto it. We dragged it through the gate to the west side of the mountain, and dumped it over the cliff. As the corpse of the former police officer tumbled down to its final resting place, I silently thanked him for bringing us his weapon and ammo.

Rest easy, partner, and thanks for the gear.

“What do you think we should do about the bodies at the foot of the mountain?” I asked, as we walked back toward the gate.

“I’m too damn tired and hungry to drag those sons of bitches all the way up here.” Gabe replied. “Let’s fire up the truck and use the winch to haul them up to the fence.”

Normally I would have protested the use of precious fuel, but the morning was cold, and the rumbling of my empty stomach was becoming distracting. I grunted in agreement and went into the cabin to get the keys to the truck. We pulled the Tacoma up to the eastern side of the fence where I shot the other four undead. Using the winch mounted to the front of the truck, we pulled the dead bodies to the fence and lined them up.

I checked the bodies for anything useful. Not finding anything, I helped Gabe load the bodies onto the sled and into the back of the truck. After the last of the morning’s casualties were disposed of down the other side of the mountain, Gabe and I parked the truck under the carport and went back to the cabin to make breakfast.

The cabin is a small affair, consisting only of a common room and two small bedrooms. The common room is little more than a couple of comfortable reclining chairs in front of a wood burning stove and a small kitchen. There is a small table in the kitchen with two wooden chairs where Gabe and I eat most of our meals. The bedrooms are on either side of the common room. Mine is on the eastern side of the cabin, and Gabe’s is on the western end. The cabin has four windows. They are on the north and south sides of the cabin, and rimmed with heavy iron shutters and padlocks. We drape heavy burlap covers over the windows at night to keep the light of the lantern from getting out. The cabin roof has solar panels on it to power what few electrical devices we still have. Mostly we use it to light the place up at night, run the computer, and power the radio.

We both took off our boots and left them just inside the door so as not to track any snow or dirt inside. We hung our guns up by their shoulder straps on hooks set into the wall and propped our swords up in a corner. We would clean the rifles, and then sharpen and polish the swords, as soon as we finished breakfast.

As Gabe squatted down by the stove to get a fire going, I took down some strips of dried meat hanging from a string in the kitchen and couple of cans of potatoes and kidney beans from the pantry. I took the lid off a rain barrel and ladled some clean water into a pot with the dried meat. I poured some more water into a larger pot and set both of them on the wood stove, followed by the canned goods.

“What’s the hot water for?” Gabe asked.

“We’re having tea with our breakfast this morning.” I replied.

Gabe rocked back on his heels. “What’s the occasion?”

We have a limited amount of tea, and only dip into our jealously hoarded supply on special occasions. I took a tin of English breakfast tea from a cabinet and held it up for Gabe to see.

“Dude, today is Christmas.” I said.

Gabe looked bewildered for a moment, then laughed.

“No shit. Man, I totally forgot. Fuckin’ Christmas...” He shook his head and went back to feeding little sticks into the kindling. As the fire grew, he motioned toward a stack of firewood a few feet away.

“You feel like going out and cutting down some more wood today? Between what’s in the cabin and under the tarp out back, we’ve got about three days worth. Maybe more if we start sleeping down in the bunker.”

Gabe was referring to the underground survival shelter he hired a specialized construction company to install on the western side of the cabin. When Gabe first found out about the existence of the Reanimation Phage several years earlier, he had taken some precautions to protect himself in the event of a large-scale outbreak.

“Yeah, might as well.” I replied. “We’re gonna need it sooner or later, so we’d better get it done while the weather is tolerable.”

The underground shelter stayed a constant 60 degrees, even in winter. Most nights since we finished the perimeter fence, Gabe and I preferred to sleep above ground in the cabin. It gave us a sense of normalcy to see sunlight in the morning and not have to crawl out of a damn hole in the ground every day. Now that winter was upon us, we would have to sleep in the bunker to save fuel and energy. It was not yet cold enough to start freezing the undead, but they would definitely start slowing down as winter tightened its grip on the high country.

Soon the fire in the stove was burning brightly, and Gabe tossed a few larger pieces of wood onto it. He shut stove door and opened the air valve to keep the fire well fed with oxygen. A few minutes later, the water came to a boil and I poured it into a small teakettle to steep. I grabbed a tea strainer from a drawer beside the sink, and set it on the table next to the boiled meat and canned goods.

The cabin had warmed considerably, and Gabe and I were able to hang up our heavy winter coats before sitting down to breakfast. I poured the tea into a pair of metal cups and spooned some sugar into each one. The sugar was also a rare indulgence. I held my teacup in the air and gestured for Gabe to do the same. He held it up and I said, “To Christmas, and being alive to see it.”

“To Christmas.” He replied. We clinked our cups together and took a sip of the tea.

“Mmm, good lord, I forgot how good this stuff is.” I said.

“Tell you what,” Gabe replied, “come the spring thaw, before we set out for Colorado, we should shoot down the river over to Marion. There’s a little teashop there I used to visit every couple of months. I bet there’s still some left.”

“That’s just west of here right? About fifteen miles or so down the river?”

Gabe nodded, “That’s the one.”

“Might not be a bad idea.” I said as I took another sip from my cup.

It would be nice to have a good supply of tea before heading out to Colorado. The miles would be long and weary, and a little caffeine pick-me-up is always welcome on the trail.

We finished the meal in companionable silence. After eating the canned goods, we split up the boiled meat. Gabe lifted the pot to pour some of the broth into my empty teacup, but I stopped him.

“Nope, that’s all yours buddy. My Christmas present to you.”

Gabe smiled and chuckled. “Damn, now I gotta get you something.”

“Tell you what,” I said, pointing toward his pack, “you get that Sig we found this morning in working condition, and get those bullets cleaned up, and we’ll call it even.”

“Sounds like a deal.” He said.

Gabe poured the rest of the broth into his cup and sat back in his chair, savoring it in little sips. When boiled in clean water, the smoked venison makes a wonderfully flavorful broth. Most of the food we had been eating since winter had set in did not have very much flavor to it. Dried meat and canned vegetables will keep you alive, but without spices and salt to season them, they leave a lot to be desired as far as taste goes. Gabe had a few barrels of salt in the underground shelter, but we didn’t waste it on edible food. We only used it to preserve meat from what wild game we could hunt in the forest, or catch from nearby lakes and streams.

We spent the rest of the morning cleaning the guns we brought with us on our patrol, and then set to cleaning the blades. My small sword is easy to maintain, as it doesn’t have any edges that require sharpening. All I have to do is wipe smears of brain matter off the last seven or eight inches of the blade, and run a steel file over the tip to keep it nice and pointy. Gabe’s Falcata takes a little more work, due to the blade’s design. I had the sword custom made for him as a birthday present three years ago, a year and a half before the end of civilization.

A few months before his birthday that year, I had driven up to Morganton from Charlotte to give Gabriel a hand clearing some brush from a piece of his land. The part of his property that we worked on had once been a cornfield, but over forty years had passed since the last time anyone had planted anything on it. Tall grass, shrubs, and small trees now covered it. Gabe asked if I could help him clear away the bushes and trees so that he could come through with a rotary cutter and get the grass down to a manageable level.

I brought along a military issue machete my father had given me when I was a boy, and a short axe to cut down the more sturdy growth. Gabe came to his front door carrying only a kukri machete. At first, I thought that the oddly shaped blade would be too short to do any good on the thick shrubbery, but after seeing it in action I was surprised at the amount of cutting force it could generate. I joked to Gabe that his machete looked like what would happen if a battle-axe and a broadsword had a kid.

Gabe held up the blade and said, “You know, this thing is just a baby compared to what the Spanish used to make. They had a sword with a design a lot like this one called a Falcata. I wish I could get my hands on a good replica. I’ve wanted one of those things since I learned about them in...” he paused for a moment. The smile faded from his face before he continued, “Anyway, it’d be nice to have one.”

That was all I needed to hear. I placed a call to a guy I know who works at Legion Forge. Legion was a small company that specialized in making functional custom replicas of historical weapons. They had done a lot of work for me, and I’d sent a good bit of business their way from other collectors. Before the undead took over the world, I was an avid sword collector.