Rotten (21 page)

I heard the tinkle of the fishing bells strung on the wire surrounding the house and snapped instantly awake and sat up in the chair.

“It was the wind,” Rotten said softly.  “Come on, our shift is over, let’s wake up Highland.” 

We stepped in the house quietly, trying not to disturb Will who was curled up in the recliner, and woke up Highland.  Highland sat up on the couch; rubbing his hands through his hair and making it stand on end.  “Okay, I’m up.”  He picked up his rifle and stepped out onto the porch.  I stretched out on one end of the couch, and Rotten took the other end as Moonshine and Princess were in the king sized bed and we didn’t want to disturb them.  I closed my eyes but couldn’t reclaim the gentle drowsiness I felt on the porch. 

I heard the girls whispering in the loft and sat up.  “Is everything okay?”  I said when I saw Rebekah’s head appear over the railing.

“No, Sarah said everyone should get up, the feeling is very bad.” 

I jumped to my feet.  “Rotten, Will wake up.  Rebekah, run downstairs and wake up Sully and Mrs. Williams.  Princess!  Moonshine!  You guys get up.” 

Will hopped out of the recliner and pulled on his silver stiff shirt.  “Which direction?”

“The river again,” Rebekah said, following him down the stairs.

Highland opened the door just as Will hit the switch for the floodlights.  “Probably the zombies we saw in the water,” he said, as we piled out onto the porch.

Princess and Mrs. Williams stood at the glass inside the house with Sarah as Rebekah stepped beside me with her father’s rifle in her hands.  “She said it’s never been this bad.” 

“Shit,” Moonshine said, looking at the path that led to the water.  “Do you think they all followed us?” 

“I sure as hell hope not, that’d be at least twenty, if not more,” Rotten picked up the flashlight and scanned the tree line.

“If so, take it slow and easy, let’s not waste all our bullets,” Sully released a breath and pulled the rifle up to his shoulder, staring down the barrel. 

“I smell them,” I whispered, stepping to the railing and lifting my pistol. 

“Yeah, me too,” Rebekah said, taking her place beside me. 

We waited and jumped when our noisy security system jangled, seemingly coming from all around us.

“Fuck!”  Moonshine lifted his weapon.  “They’re everywhere.” 

I still didn’t see anything, but the smell was thick.  Rotten dropped the light on the deck as he lifted his pistol, and Princess came onto the porch and picked it up, scanning the yard. 

The first one appeared on the trail, wet and bloated, and Sully fired, knocking it backward into the two others behind it.  Sully and Highland fired the next two shots, knocking those to the ground as more came from behind them, stepping over and on top of the bodies.  One fell to its knees, Will fired and the zombie’s head crushed inward and it collapsed.

“Over there!” Princess shined the light on the other side of the driveway where two more were just stepping into the glow of the floodlights.  Rebekah fired, knocking it down with one shot, and it took three for me to get the next one with the pistol.   Then it was impossible to tell who was firing and the dead fell, quickly replaced with more.

“Shit,” Rotten yelled, and dashed into the house. 

I ran out of bullets and had no idea how to put more into the gun so I stood there helplessly as more and more zombies appeared, not just on the trail, but coming out of the woods around us like cockroaches.  They were getting closer to the cabin and I briefly thought we wouldn’t make it to see morning and then I heard a crash from inside.  I turned expecting to see deadheads inside the house, but Mrs. Williams and Sarah still stood at the glass wall looking out at us.

Suddenly Sarah cried out and covered her ears, Rebekah and Will dropped their guns and did the same.  I looked down into the yard and all the zombies had frozen in place, unmoving, as though a switch inside their brains had been flipped.  Then it became easy to pick them off, Sully, Highland, and Moonshine fired and the zombies fell, one by one. 

“That’s it,” Sully said, looking over the yard thoroughly, and then at Will and Rebekah on their knees and holding their heads.  “Turn it off!”  

Slowly the kids pulled their hands away from their heads.  “Shitfire, that hurts,” Will said, helping Rebekah to her feet.

Sarah ran out onto the porch with tears streaming down her face and threw herself in Rebekah’s arms.  “I hate that thing!”

“I do too, but it works.”  Rebekah glanced down in the yard as she rubbed her sister’s back.

“Never seen anything like it, it just short circuited them or something,” Moonshine said.  “And I thought you were being a wimp by running away, Rotten.  Hell, you saved our asses, what did you do?”

“I plugged the TV speakers into the radio, luckily I had left it on the channel with the broadcast.  Bad news is I’m pretty sure I broke the TV in the process.”

“That’s crazy how they just froze in place.”  Moonshine shook his head slowly.  “We’re going to have a heck of a mess to clean up in the morning, though.”  He looked down in the yard, counting the bodies.  “I’m not digging ditches for all of them, we should take them out to the field and burn them or something.”

“We need to think about that,” Sully said, sitting down in one of the rockers.  “Today you said you thought they smelled you, maybe they followed your scent back here.  If that’s the case, and as much as I hate to say it, leaving them out to rot may be a way to protect ourselves.”

“Gross,” Princess said.

“He may be right.”  Rebekah pulled out of Sarah’s embrace, keeping one arm around her sister’s shoulders.  “We had a lot pass the house, and besides the people that usually came to the house when they were alive, the others just passed by unless they heard the rooster.  There are a lot of deadheads in our yard, maybe they couldn’t smell me and Sarah over the rotting odor.” 

“I sure as hell don’t want to be tripping over rotting zombies.”  Princess shuddered.  “That’s just sick.” 

“Maybe we could make a perimeter off in the woods with their bodies,” Highland suggested.  “So we don’t see them, but it will cover our scent if they are passing by.” 

“It seems pretty unsanitary,” I said.  “Besides the radio noise stops them.”

“Yeah, but it may end up hemorrhaging the kid’s brains, that should be used as a last resort or when the kids aren’t around,” Sully said.

“Noise canceling headphones and some ipods, that’s what the kids need, and now that we can get into town hopefully we can find some.”  Rotten dropped down into the other rocker.  

“I have an ipod at home,” Rebekah said.  “I didn’t bring it because the power was out and the battery was dead.”

“We’ll pick it up in the morning, we can charge it here.”

Sully stood up.  “Sarah, do you feel any more coming?”

“No, sir.”  She shook her head.

“Okay, we should try to get some rest, we’re going to have a busy day tomorrow,” Mrs. Williams said. 

Day Nine

Friday

December 19, 2014

We got up with the sun, ate a breakfast of eggs and pop tarts, and everyone dressed in their zombie proof clothing, including gloves and facemasks, and we began forming a perimeter of decaying bodies, out of sight of the cabin.   As we moved the zombies, and not under the threat of imminent death, we studied them, trying once again to understand the impossible.  Most had wounds, bite marks and various, disgusting, tears in their skin and they were all in varying degrees of decomposition.  They had been in the water on their way to the cabin and they were damp and cold, but they weren’t as bloated as Grady had been.  Although the wounds were deep, there wasn’t a lot of gore.   Of course there were internal organs exposed, and lots of intestines, but they had been dead for a while and most of the fluids that run the human body had already leaked out. 

“You wouldn’t think they’d be this light.”  Moonshine dragged a corpse dressed in denim and positioned it beside a tree. 

“It’s dehydrated.”  Sully helped Mrs. Williams move an older woman with no visible wounds who was dressed in a floral print. 

“They sure seem to go for the gut bite,” Princess said, as we moved a younger male whose torn sweatshirt exposed ropey, yet thankfully, dried intestines.

As we created the barrier of deadheads, Sarah checked the fishing lines strung with odds and ends.  I think we all worried over her, unable to imagine seeing such horrors at her age, but by all appearances she seemed to take it in stride.  I guess we were witnessing what they call the resilience of children.

“The signal, tone, or whatever it is, why does it affect zombies and kids?” I said, as Princess and I dragged a carcass across the driveway. 

“Highland said our hearing grows worse over the years and I guess that makes sense, but maybe it’s something else too.  Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for; they see things that adults are desensitized to.  You know that saying ‘from the mouths of babes’?  It’s pretty accurate and kids aren’t distracted like we are, their minds are new, fresh, and open and maybe the zombies are no longer distracted either.  I don’t imagine the deadheads are worried about bills, jobs, and responsibilities like we are, and kids don’t have those worries either, maybe kids and zombies hear the tone not just because of physical hearing, but because there is a part of their brain that is open.  We used to have it too, but it shut a long ago for us when we grew up.”  Princess dropped her end of the remains beside a tangle of blackberry vines.

“Like brain damage?  Like we’re the brain damaged ones and not the zombies?”  I said, looking down at the corpse. 

“Scary thought, isn’t it?”  Princess turned back to the yard.

We counted thirty-two bodies, but due to how light they were we moved them quickly.  Rotten was sure they were the same ones from Arlington.  “I remember that old lady in the flowery dress.”

“You know what that means, right?” Moonshine said, pulling off the mask and shoving it in the pocket of his jacket.  “That one legged lady in the dress is probably on her way.”

“Crap,” Rotten said.  “Hopefully it’ll take a while to drag herself here.”

We pulled out of the driveway with a couple shovels and some empty gas cans in the back of the truck, leaving Mrs. Williams, Sully, and Will at the cabin and warning them of the possible incoming zombie.  The plan was simple, stop at the cabin for speakers and possibly some headphones, bury the girls’ parents, and then retrieve the sedans and siphon the gas from the abandoned cars. 

At the next cabin, and after making sure no deadheads were lurking about, Rotten retrieved two sets of speakers and a compact stereo.  He also found two pairs of headphones, an ipod, and a roll of duct tape, which he tossed to Princess.  We stopped, as usual, just out of sight of the highway and listened for a while, and Sarah said she felt a monster was close.  “It’s not a bad, bad feeling like last night, just a little feeling,” she clarified.