The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree (13 page)

Chapter 17
:  Damming It All Too Hell

“Put the stock on your shoulder, not over it.”  The little .22 is short but still a little long for Eddie.  The butt of the gun is on top of his shoulder and the scope is jammed up against his eyeball.  He adjusts the rifle out to hold it correctly but his arms are completely straight.  He looks more like a crossing gate than a marksman.  “Now leave the butt against your shoulder and bend your arms. Just hold the rifle further back.  You can hold the stock with your left arm right in front of the trigger guard if you need to.”

He scoots his arm back.  We work on where to put his eye, how to squeeze the trigger.  Kids his age learn things like this faster than adults.  But give him a couple of years and he’ll be dumber than he ever was.  All full of hormones and puberty.  Everyone over twelve and under twenty-two is mentally retarded.  “Line up the crosshairs, squeeze the trigger.”

I’m 27.  I must only be mildly retarded.  Or maybe it’s gone into remission.

Eddie squeezes the trigger and an Asian looking guy drops.  The zombie crowd is looking more diverse today.  They must have walked here from much further away.  This part of the world is usually more monochromatic. 

“Pick one further out,” I tell him and look over his shoulder.  “See the old lady with no lower jaw?  Yeah.  Send her out.”  The rifle barks a little and the little old lady pitches straight forward and onto her face.  She’s about 75 yards away.

“Shoot as many as you like at that range, kid.  We can start building the wall with the few blockheads we have.” 

At the other end of the scaffolding, people I don’t know are loading boxes of ammo onto the wooden walkway.  Guns are evenly placed on the eastern wall.  Bows and crossbows, axes and chainsaws; all positioned here and there for quick access.  Someone has a golf club sitting at the ready.  Over by the jeep, Lou is carrying out boxes of ammo for the big .50.  It’s a lot of gun for mushroom hunting.

Ray is still wandering around in his karate outfit.  He sees me looking at him and heads our way.

“It’s jammed,’ Eddie says and holds the rifle up to show me.  An empty casing sits stuck halfway out the side of the bolt. 

“Lean it over, pull the slide back, give it a shake,
then drop the bolt.”  He does what I tell him and the little gun chambers another round.  “Keep the sling wrapped around your left arm.  If you need to haul ass, you don’t want to drop it.  And you especially don’t want to drop it off the side of the wall.”  Below us, in the mud and the vines, they stand with necks craned upwards, arms straight down.  Eddie slips another round into one on the perimeter of the woods and the empty shell falls into the open mouth of a skinny Zed below us.  The Zed doesn’t choke but rattles a horrible rasp with every inhale.  He won’t be sneaking up on anyone.  I lean over and shoot him in the face to stop the noise. 

“Getting Opie all ready?” Ray asks as he climbs up the ladder.  “We can use a good marksman.” 

Eddie Opie carefully pops the empty magazine from the rifle, puts it in his jacket pocket and pushes a fresh one into the mag well.  He hits the mag release button and takes the fresh clip out and practices putting it in again.  He repeats the process and watches the movement of his hand.  On the fourth load, he pulls the bolt back and chambers a round. 

“That’s good,” Ray says.  “It’s the ritual, man.  It’s all about the ritual.”  Ray looks over at me.  “It’s control.  The ritual gives you control. 
Or at least the illusion of control.  Because there is no control.”  The big smile.  The quack laugh.

I take a cigarette out and light it up. 
“Rituals, huh?”  I watch Eddie line up a shot on a young black Zed stumbling out of the brush.  I think he’s black anyway.  The advanced degree of rot gives all of them a shade of gray. They are all one race now and we are the minority.  Equality came in a rock from the sky.  Must be really irritating for white supremacist idiots to discern which of the zombies has superior undead genes.  The Zed Eddie is aiming at is a hundred yards out.  The round takes him in the neck.  “Aim a little higher out there.  Put the cross hairs right above his head.”  The Zed drops.  I turn back to Ray.  “Is that what the Zed in the tree were?  Ritual?”

Ray laughs.  “Yeah,” he says with a snap of his fingers.  “I forgot about that. 
But that… that was the illusion of control at its finest.”  He leans on the wall and spits a big glob onto the woman below him.  “Goddamned wretched things.  And they’re not alive, are they?  They aren’t human anymore.  The soul, the soul’s gone.  The human part left and the human body part got left behind.”  Eddie stops shooting and listens with his eye still up to the scope.  Ray continues as he folds his hands across his stomach and leans against the rail.  “And so the preacher gets bit and the rest of them are chewed on and they’re turning into these things and everybody is freaking out and I’d watched this thing on television about the Mayans and nobody wanted to shoot a little girl, even if she’s not a little girl anymore.  But you know, you still have to be some kind of sick freak to shoot a little girl, right?”

I remember the angel at the top of the tree, the dead eyes on a China doll face.  Ray straightens the front of his karate outfit.  “So we’ve got to do something with them, right?  It’s just mean to turn them out into the world to do… this.”  He sweeps his arms over the crowd below.  “So, I don’t know.  We put them up in the tree as an offering to God or something.  It doesn’t make any sense right now.  As I say it.  Out loud.  Of course, it didn’t really make any sense right then either.”  He stops and smiles at me.  “I’d eaten a bunch of Xanax and drank some red wine.”  He leans
in and quietly says, “But these people.  They’ll believe anything when they’re scared.”

Eddie snaps off a couple of quick shots and two drop at once.  He brings the rifle down and his eyes are red like his hair.  In a voice I can hardly hear, he looks down at the gun in his hands and asks me, “You really think they aren’t human, anymore?  When they get like this?”

I put my hand on his shoulder.  “They’re not human anymore.  I don’t know what they are, but they’re gone.  We’re just doing them a favor.  And trying to survive all at the same time.”

“You got that shit right,” Ray says.  He’s oblivious to what Eddie is really asking.  Eddie doesn’t know how lucky he is to have not had a choice. 

Hank drives by and parks the tractor in front of the gates to fortify the flimsy steel panels.  He raises the bucket on the front to act as a crow’s nest.  The tractor is sitting crooked on the hill that slopes away from the gate and the raised bucket makes it look like it is about to fall over.

Lou has the big .50 loaded and all of the ammo for that gun arranged in the back of the jeep.  Ray yells down to Lou, “Good.  Now move it over to the thing. 
Like we talked about.”  Ray points towards the bunker.  Lou drives off and parks the jeep facing the eastern wall.  Ray turns to me, “Custer’s last stand.  I figure if something goes wrong and we’ve got to get underground, we can leave someone on there to mow them down while the rest of us, you know, run like hell.”  Again the laugh.  Eddie is practicing putting the clip in the rifle.  He takes it out, puts it in his pocket, finds it again and loads.  Faster every time.  More efficient every time.

Kevin has climbed up onto the walkway from the opposite end and walks up to join us.  He looks more stoned than ever.  He’s got the sniper gun with the night-vision slung onto his shoulder.  He carries the rifle he had earlier in the maw of his great, meaty hand.  I
can see that he has added the words ‘Death Eats Death’ below the words ‘Pig Sticker’ on the side of the cardboard scabbard of his machete. 

“
They’s a bunch of them, ain’t they?” he asks.  Ray nods, but clearly doesn’t know what to make of the big man.  “Teach’n the boy how ta shoot?”Eddie’s eyebrows fold in at the word boy.  Kevin puts his hand on Eddie’s shoulder.  “Don’t worry, man.  You’ll do fine.” 

The eastern side of the compound is getting crowded and the
Zed are starting to file around to the south and north.  A few have already gathered along the muddy western side, having waded in from further away. 

Kevin pops a
thirty round clip into the Mini-14 and slides the bolt home.  “Reckon we oughta pile a few of them critters up out there.  Gonna take a buncha rounds to stack’em up.  Don’t know if we got that much ammo.”

“Well,” Ray says with a big pull of misty morning air through his nose, “even a little hill will slow them down, push them around.”

Kevin laughs.  “Ain’t never built a damn before, have ya?”  Ray shrugs.  “Problem with not building the wall high enough is that you just end up letting the water pour in.  It gets trapped there.  Be like building them a ladder if we fuck it up.”

Eddie is listening pretty intently.  I’ve given him two boxes of ammo, 1100 rounds.  Kevin looks down at Eddie and lays a hand on the barrel.  “Watch your barrel, man.  If it gets hot, take a break.  Don’t let it get too warm.”  Eddie nods and pulls a loaded clip out of his pocket and loads it into the rifle without looking.  Kids pick up things so fast.

Kevin wedges a piece of toilet paper into one ear and offers a torn piece to the rest of us.  “This bitch is loud.”  We all plug up as he leans the barrel over the top log.  I watch behind us as he lets the first round loose.  The people in the courtyard all jump as the .223 erupts with a flash of flame.  Two Zeds lose their heads and two more behind them spin and stumble from the round.  A fifth one falls on a busted leg but continues to crawl.

“Holy shit,” Kevin says with a smile.  “
Them things is so rotten you can kill about fourteen with one shot.”

A boom thunders from the opposite end of the wall and three
Zed crumble face down.  The wooden floor beneath us shakes as more people are climbing up to start the shooting match.  It will take some time. 

I’m watching Eddie shoot and looking for Karen all at the same time.  I’ve not seen her since the bunker.  I do finally see Tyler, strolling across the courtyard.  He’s still carrying the MP5
. And now he has an axe.  He’s headed towards the bunker.  His shoulders are slumped and he walks with a sense of purpose and defeat.  I guess he’ll sit this one out.

Something heavy and metal clicks together near my ear.  I turn around to see Ray holding the two hand grenades by their pins.  “And if everything fails. 
Catastrophic.  Epic.  Fail.  Well… we can take the A-train to Hell.” 

“That’s about all they’re good for,” I tell him.  He makes me nervous with those things.

Eddie is laying down some steady fire and reloading smoothly.  Kevin is pounding away and I suppose I should spend a few rounds myself.  I lean over the wall and pull the T-handle of the AR’s bolt back and slide a round in. 

The entire forest to the east seems to be alive with giant, rotting, people-si
zed, man-eating ants.  I see a tall sapling bend as it is crushed to the ground.  The absurdity of the scene hits me and I smile as I begin to sing softly to myself.  “Just what makes that silly old ant, think he can move that rubber tree plant.”  The rifle rocks against my shoulder.  A tall one drops, a short one dies, a fat one tips, a skinny one breaks.  “Everyone knows an ant, can’t, move a rubber tree plant.” A black one, a white one, a man, a woman.  “He’s got high hopes, he’s got high hopes.”  Three teen Zeds fall in three shots.  “High apple pie in the sky hopes,” I sing to myself. 

I look over at Eddie and smile.  I can tell from his expression that he’s scared.  Maybe he’s smarter than anyone here. We should all be scared.  We are wading slowly into deep water. 

I slam a fresh magazine into the rifle and rack the bolt.  I continue to sing but there’s a lump of fear rising from deep down in my throat.  “Once there was a silly old ram, thought he’d punch a hole in the dam.”  An old man Zed with a long white beard takes one through the teeth.  The bullet punches through and hits the farmer behind him through the eye.  Below me the beasts howl and crush against the logs.  The platform under me rocks softly and I cannot tell if it is just the platform or the entire log wall. 

“No one could make that ram, scram… he kept
butt’n that damn.”  A redheaded man with a beard loses half of his face as does the bald man behind him.  The wall is definitely moving.  Out beyond the compound wall, the fence we are building from rotting flesh and fragile bone is growing, but it is too wide and too short.

“Tell everyone to shoot the ones at the top of the hill.  And only at the top of the hill,” I yell to Ray.  “And tell people to conserve ammo.  We need a backup plan if this all goes to hell.”

Ray nods and begins picking his way down the catwalk talking to each person.  I reach down and put my hand on Eddie’s barrel.  It’s red hot.  “Take a break,” I tell him.  He stops and slumps into a pile against me.  I can’t hear him crying over the roar of the monsters below and the gunfire, but I can feel the wracking sobs against my leg. 

There is nothing I can do for him.  Nothing I can say.  No one I can be.  No place to go.  No lie to tell.  No hope to offer.  No end in sight.

I see Karen walking towards the catwalk and motion her to come up.  I give Eddie a shake to bring him around.  I shake him a little too hard but it snaps him out of crying.  I lean down into his ear and try to talk without yelling, “Go get something to eat.  Let your gun cool down.  And take care of Karen for me.  Alright?”