The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree (14 page)

He nods and wipes his nose.  He grabs his rifle and scrambles down the ladder away from the noise and the death and the undead.  I watch Karen put an arm around him and lead him away towards the bath
house.  She doesn’t look back at me as she leaves.

“Goddamn, man.  Look at this shit,” Kevin yells.

The noise from below is deafening as the Zed begin to pour over our hill of bodies like it isn’t there.  I look straight down to the bottom of the compound wall and see a short soccer mom stumble and disappear.  The crowd closes in and she is gone.  They bump against each other and shriek and moan and tear at the logs. Spit and black blood and fury spray into the air.  I keep watching as they crush each other against the wall.  For a split second, a hole opens up where the soccer mom was and I see her face looking up as another Zed steps on her windpipe trying to get closer, get in, get us.  Another surge in the crowd and several in the middle fall.  The cycle repeats with the ones underneath becoming the new floor.  The crowd is growing taller by a head with every collapse. 

Kevin is shaking his head.  “This
ain’t gonna work, man.  We ain’t got enough ammo er people er noth’n.” 

I nod in agreement.  Ray is coming back along the catwalk.  He looks excited and happy.  I motion him over.  “Tell everybody to quit shooting.  Cease fire.  We’re just making a mess out of this.”

“What?’ he asks me.  “Whadya mean?  We’re doing great.”

“No.  We’re not.  We’re making a mess out of it.  Just let them go around.”

Ray pats the air in front of him.  “I got this.  I can fix this.”  He walks down to the corner of the compound and pulls something out of his pocket.  I see him pull the pin on one of the grenades and throw it as hard as he can.  The little metal ball hits a young sapling tree squarely and bounces backwards.  An explosion rocks the front gates as metal shrapnel flies into the compound.  The big tractor rocks up on one side and falls with a heavy thud.  Arms and legs and heads poke through the holes and tear at the damaged metal.

“What in the hell…” Kevin yells at me. 

“We’re fucked,” I yell back.  Kevin and I start climbing down the ladder, bringing everything we can carry.  Others panic and jump off.  Lou is in the back of the jeep pointing the big .50 at the front gate.  As I make for the bath house, the rain begins to fall again in a slow steady drizzle that promises to last the night.  It might be the only thing that does.

Chapter 18:  You Bunker, You
Brought’er

I see Hank when I hit the bottom of the ladder.  He’s not trapped under the tractor like dad. But he does have a big piece of the gate sticking out of his shoulder.  He’s walking slowly away from the tractor, in shock and bleeding.  I pull my rifle up and put the front sight on his chest.  He falls into a heap before I can pull the trigger.  Relief fills me.

“Come on, man.  What are you
wait’n for?”  For a big guy, Kevin is hauling ass.  He’s headed to the bunker like most everyone else.  A few people remain on the catwalk, frozen in fear, anchored in their inability to comprehend.  I head for the bath house.  Over at the front gate, the first of a hundred million zombies works his way into the compound.  I duck when the .50 fires a single round into him, tearing him in half.  A big piece of the post holding what’s left of the gate goes with it.  Too much gun.  The rest start to spill into the compound like sand out of a boot.

Karen pops out of the bath
house just as I get there.  I wave her on towards the bunker. She’s got Eddie by the arm, dragging him with her.  He has his rifle in one hand and a bag in the other.  His eyes are wide and his mouth hangs open.  I fly into the bath house, grab my pack, and back out.  But the Zed are covering ground quick.  Lou opens up with the .50 in full auto and starts plowing the ground beside me.  He’s not even aiming.  The guy running next to me explodes in a red mist, his leg gone from the knee down.  I hear screaming behind but I don’t look back.

Something pulls at my pack.  I keep trying to run but there are three of them on me.  They look fresh and move faster than the rotten ones.  Probably around eighteen
years old.  Which makes them over twelve and under twenty.  Retarded zombies.  One with a festering bite wound on his shoulder sets his feet and pulls on me hard.  I feel something move by my face like a deer fly or a hummingbird.  The one pulling lets go with a neat little hole under his eye.  I turn around to see Eddie has stopped and is emptying round after round past my head.  One little, two little, three little and they are down.

I take off again and try to run straight to keep from getting shot.  I see Eddie reload and resume firing.  As I get closer, I wave him on.  “Go, go, go, go…”  He turns and sprints. 

Lou is overrun on the jeep.  He’s climbing up on the gun now instead of shooting it.  There’s no way out for him.  I pull the big single shot and pause just long enough to put the cross hairs on his chest.  The hammer comes back and then I touch the trigger.  The gun roars and a fireball erupts from the end.  Lou drops in a slump.  The Zed running towards me is knocked down by the blast.  I step on his face as I take off again. You’re welcome, Lou. 

A white
karate suit and a gray head of hair fly by me, knees and elbows pumping way too high as the adrenaline in Ray’s body winds him beyond his capabilities. He looks like an Albert Einstein superhero action figure.  I can hear him yelling as he runs, “What the fuck!  What the fuck!  What the fuck did you do, Ray?  What the fuck?” He passes me like I’m going the other direction.  “What the fuck did you do, Ray?”

  Good question.

Karen grabs Eddie at the entrance and down they go.  Tyler is manning the MP5 and trying to maintain a perimeter.  Kevin is beside him firing and screaming at the top of his lungs, “Betty!  Betty!”  He screams and looks and shoots and looks and screams and screams and screams.

I see Dawn and Donna make a break for the bunker from the side of the main house.  Little Dawn doesn’t see one of the
Zed coming in behind her at an angle.  I can’t get a shot at him over her shoulder.  He catches her arm and sinks his rotten Zed teeth into the back of her hand.  He chews and tears and holds onto her arm while Big Donna drags both of them to the entrance. 

Dawn’s eyes are wild and she can’t break free of the fucker.  They’re up to the door when I pull my cleaver out and bring it down through her wrist, severing the infected hand.  The
Zed with the hand sandwich falls backwards into the mud.  I bring the AR around and walk a line of rounds up from his dick to his forehead.  I’m still pulling the trigger, even after the click of the empty chamber. 

I look back towards the gate, towards the east wall, back to the jeep and then the house.  I hear a chainsaw running in the distance.  I hear frantic fire coming from the center of the crowd.  Two shots sound at almost the same instant then they are quiet.  The saw switches to idle, somewhere out in the
re in the mud.

“Get in, shut the door!” Ray is screaming below us. 

Tyler is out of ammo in the little sub gun and drops it down into the hole.  He pulls out one of his pistols and starts trying to shoot the closest ones but there are too many.  Kevin is swinging his machete and the butt of his rifle.  I take out my last loaded magazine and slam it home.  “Get in now,” I yell at them. 

Tyler ducks in and I grab Kevin by the back of his shirt.  “No, goddamn it.  I need to find...” but he is cut off when a huge, naked
Zed woman slams into him on the run.  His machete clatters down the steps in front of him as he takes every step the hard way.  She falls in the hole after him and I hear a shot ring out below me. 

It’s over. If you’re not in, you’re out.  I grab the open cellar door and swing it shut behind me.

The giant, naked Zed woman is sprawled out at the bottom of the steps face down.  Her mottled eyeball is lying about six inches from her head which is blocking the door to the metal container.  Ray shoves on the door and tries to push it past her but she has to go a good four hundred pounds.  “Mother of Christ,” Ray says with a laugh.  “It’s a good thing that uh… well, it’s a good thing you got a round into her,” he tells Karen.  Karen is still shaking and holding her Winchester.  Her chest heaves looking for oxygen and stability. Her eyes are glass and her leg spasms in small ripples. Ray wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his white karate sleeve.  A yellow stain runs down the left side of his white pants.  “If you hadn’t shot her, she’d of swallowed us whole.”  Quack.  Sigh.  No takers.

We all stand motionless and speechless.  The howling and banging from the outside fills the small room at the bottom of the steps.  Little Dawn’s sobs cause us all to look towards the door of the metal containers.  Slowly, Tyler picks up the axe he was carrying and straddles one of the dead
Zed’s legs.  He swings down hard into her leg and buries the blade into her hip socket.  The next shot sends a chunk of rotten bone and grey flesh towards Ray who ducks.  “Hold it, hold it,” he says and moves out of the corner.  “What the hell are you doing?  We don’t need her for food or…lamp oil for fuck’s sake.”

Tyler stops and readies the axe again.  “How long are we going to be down here?”  It’s more than I’ve heard him say since Daisy departed.  Ray shrugs an ‘I don’t
know.’  “Do you really want to be down here in a confined space with a giant, rotting corpse?  We don’t know the pathology of these things.  It could infect us all if we leave it.  And we can’t carry it out.  Not in one piece, anyway.”  He swings the axe again and the leg moves away from the body.  One hunk of flesh on the inner thigh holds the leg to the body. 

Kevin stands up and continues to touch his hand to the gash on his head and then look at the blood on his fingers.  “Fucking bitch,” is all I hear him mutter before picking up his machete and removing the rest of the leg. 

Ray starts to dry heave as the two of them work to remove her other leg.  Next comes her head and her left arm.  Kevin points at the dismembered corpse and tells Tyler, “Leave t’other arm on her.  We’ll need some way of dragging the bitch out of here.”

Overhead, at the top of the stairs, the metal doors shake and clang and rattle as the
Zed outside try to get in.  I check the magazine in my rifle.  I’ve still got about twenty rounds left.  I reload and step back away from the door.  “Watch your ears.  I’m gonna open this thing.”  I watch the metal door and listen for the next thud of a rotten fist or a damaged head.  A big thump lands in the middle of the left hand door and I put a round where the thump landed.  A small ray of daylight pokes down into the dark from the hole.  The hole goes dark again and I put one right beside it.  A few shots high, a couple low.  The heavy sounds of bodies collapsing against the metal cellar doors fill the small room.  The first hole is showing daylight again and stays clear. 

I put the rifle down and rummage through my pack for more .45 ammo.  I find a ten round mag in the side pouch and slide it home.  “Ready?”  I ask behind me.  Ray is holding the head of the
Zed woman by the hair.  He looks like some kind of demented trick-or-treater in his karate outfit and Medusa-head treat bucket.  Tyler and Kevin have a leg each.  I ease open the door and kick at the bodies blocking the way.  The head of a spine shot Zed snaps at me near my boot and I punt him hard in the face.  Instead of hitting something hard, his face disappears in a smear across the bottom of my boot.  The skeleton head snaps and bites some more.  I put a .45 slug through his ear and kick him again.  “Alright,” I tell them.

Ray chucks the head out and walks quickly away trying to shake
the yuck off of his hand.  Kevin and Tyler throw the legs out and I shut the door.  Ray returns with the arm.  It takes all three of them to pull her up and push her away.  Each time Kevin gets near the door, he looks around for as long as he can to see if Betty is anywhere. 

She isn’t.

Inside the containers, Little Dawn is crying hysterically as Big Donna tries to wrap up her bloody stump of an arm.  A sink with a working faucet sits just outside the container and we all wash as much of the death and rot off of us as we can.  Eddie and Karen sit stunned on the doorstep into the container staring blankly at the huge stain on the floor.

I dry off and remove my filthy outer garments.  And that’s when I see it. 
The cut on my thigh.  It hasn’t bled much but it is a bright red stripe across my right leg.  I look carefully around the wound.  Black blood is splattered all around it but I can’t see any on it.  A horrible idea blossoms at the bottom of my skull.  I feel like sitting down and throwing up.  What if I’m infected?  I know the bites spread the infection.  Would Zed blood in an open wound do the same thing? 

It almost looks like a bullet wound, a small caliber bullet that might have gra
zed my leg while I was running.  A .22 bullet maybe.  But I wouldn’t even be down here if it wasn’t for the kid.  I walk over to Eddie and stick out my hand.  “Thanks,” I tell him.  He looks up at me and takes my hand.  I’m probably thanking him for killing me. “You saved my ass out there.  I’d be toast if you hadn’t been there.”  For just a second, I see something close to a smile cross his face.  It’s the first time I’ve seen him look anything other than miserable. 

Karen doesn’t look so good.  I help her up and walk her inside.  The second container is set up like a dorm with bunk beds and a table at one end.  It’s tight in here but there’s nowhere I’d rather be right at this moment, even with the screaming and crying coming from little Dawn.  A couple of the wind-up flashlights lay here and there providing eerie, yellow illumination in the dark metal coffin.  The sound coming from the metal outer doors of the bunker fades as we move further inside. I put Karen into a bunk and take off her boots.  She stares straight ahead as I help
her.  “I never wanted to be here for any of this.  I don’t want to live like this.”  She doesn’t really look like she’s all that
here
for the any of
this
so maybe she’s finding another path to what she wants.

“What are we going to do?” Big Donna asks me.  She’s crying now but trying to hold a towel around little Dawn’s stump. 

“I don’t want to die.  I don’t want to turn into one of them,” little Dawn is saying in great teary gasps and slurred, consonant-less words leaking from a jaw wedged open by pain and terror.  We might both be infected.  We might change in the dark and kill everyone in here. 

Tyler appears from the storage side of the bunker carrying a field med kit and a book with a large red cross on the cover.  “Take off your belt,” he says without looking up.  None of us move.  Tyler repeats his instructions in a calm voice.  “Someone take off their belt and put it around her arm.  We need a tourniquet.”

I pull mine out of the belt loops and walk over to where little Dawn is sitting.  She begins shrieking and trying to get away from me.  “No.  Keep him away.  He did this to me.  Get him away from…”

Big Donna cuts her off with a big right hook to the temple.  “She’ll thank me later.  Put the tourniquet on.  Tie it off as close to the end as you can.” 

I loop it around her wrist and pull it tight.  Big Donna releases the towel and we take a look at my handy work.  The cleaver has left part of her hand just beyond the wrist but there is no sign of the bite mark left.  The flesh still looks red and alive and uninfected.  Tyler is putting on purple nitrile gloves and walking towards us with a small scalpel.  He looks at the book and then back to the hand.  “We’re going to need the super glue out of the kit.  Unless someone here knows how to sew.”

I hear a thump as Ray passes out in the corner.  I would have thought all the squeamish people would be dead by now. 
Or deadish.  But it appears some have survived.

“Do you need any help?”  It’s Eddie. 
One tough fucking little kid.  I wonder if he was born like this or just ended up this way.  Horror has a way of opening your field of view, removing limitations.