The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree (21 page)

DOWN TIME

When I got in the house, Ricki was waiting there. Paul was with her. Her golden summer tan had gone pale and her blue eyes looked drained of color.

“Steve…what is this?” she said to me. “It’s all over the TV. It’s happening everywhere. They’re declaring martial law.”

She wanted to know what it was, but I didn’t dare tell her what I suspected. I had never told her about what I had seen in Iraq. It was too weird, too painful, too unbelievable. She would have thought I was nuts. But what had happened over there in a small, isolated pocket had gone global now. It was everywhere. It was no longer murky, white-knuckled memories that would wake me up sweating at four in the morning. It was here and it was now.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Well, they’re not terrorists,” Paul said. “That’s for sure. They’re goddamn zombies.”

I felt it all start to boil out of me then. Normally, when your ten-year old son says something like that you tell him to watch his mouth. But I did not tell him that. Neither did
Ricki. I had all I could do not to start laughing at the absurdity of it all. But I knew if I started laughing I would scare the hell out of them and they were plenty freaked out by then.

“There are no such things as zombies,”
Ricki said, just repeating by rote the things parents have to say. Even now, it was so ingrained in her she couldn’t help herself.

“Oh yeah?
Then what are they, mom?”

Neither of us had any answer to that.

“Spooks aren’t real,” she said, trying to believe it herself.

And isn’t that what you tell your kids? Zombies and ghosts and all that crazy shit
is just make-believe movie-stuff, comic book shit. There aren’t really witches flying on broomsticks or ghosts in closets or things scratching under beds. Pure fantasy. Things dreamed up by superstitious people who were scared of the dark and confused by their world. The only reason any of that stuff survived was that people found a way to squeeze a buck out of it. First they did it to scare people and then to cater to teenage girls who thought ghouls were cute. That’s how horrible bloodsucking monsters had become angst-ridden androgynous pretty boys who hung around smoothie bars and werewolves had become coiffed male models with waxed chests. Watered-down, romanticized, 100% non-threatening. But scary or effeminate, it was all bullshit and nobody with a modern, functioning brain took that crap seriously. And you made damn sure your kids didn’t or they were headed for a future that included bi-weekly visits to the therapy couch.

But now this.

In the streets, the walking dead.

“Paul,” I said. “Go upstairs and grab my cell. It’s on the dresser.”

“Okay,” he said, taking off.

When he was gone, I took
Ricki aside. I gripped her by the shoulders and said, “I don’t know what’s happening exactly, but this town is under siege and we better batten down the hatches and ride it out. Let the police clean it up.”

Ricki
still had that dazed look in her eyes. “They’re dead. I watched them out the window. Those aren’t people. They’re dead.”

“I know,” I said.

“And you’re okay with that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I’m okay with,
Ricki. It’s happening so we deal with it.”

I was trying to appeal to her practical streak. Inside,
Ricki was tough. Maybe on the outside she was small and petite, but on the inside she was 110 pounds of attitude once she got going. And I needed her to get going right then.

“The best thing to do is hole up in the basement,” she said, taking the bait, switching gears so fast it astounded me as always. “We’ve got a bathroom down there.
A bedroom. A fold-out couch. The camping stuff and sleeping bags are down there. I’ll bring some food down. Some water. We’ll need some basic first-aid items.”

She started sorting around in the kitchen.

Paul returned with my cell. I called a few people in the neighborhood and got no answer. I called Ricki’s mom. Nothing. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.

“Did you get a hold of Carty?”
Ricki called out to me.

“She’s not answering. Neither is your mother.”

She frowned. She dug her cell out of her purse. “I better call Diane.”

When
Ricki calls Diane, she means business. Diane’s head wasn’t much good from all the drugs she’d taken through the years. Let’s just say that Diane’s morals are loose, her ethics questionable, and her common sense negligible. Ricki called the apartment building where she lived—Diane did not have a cellphone, the FBI could track your movements with one—but there was no answer.

She sighed. “Where the hell is everyone?”

“You know Diane,” I said.

We packed up stuff and brought it downstairs. There were still a few zombies in the streets but I was hearing gunfire, both near and far, and I knew people were fighting. That was good. As long as they kept fighting we could turn this around…however it had happened. I got out the only two guns I owned. One was a Remington 12-gauge pump. I loaded it with buckshot and gave it to
Ricki.

“Use it if you have to,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll need it, but let’s err on the side of caution.”

The basement was the best idea. The door leading down there was solid oak and it would take a tank to breach it. Once it was dead-bolted and locked, no one would get through it.

“Are you going out again, Dad?” Paul asked me.

Ricki stopped what she was doing and looked at me. Just for a moment. I knew without a doubt that she wanted to warn me against playing hero, but on the other hand we couldn’t reach her mother or Carty, who was one of our best friends in the world. As much as I wanted to hide out with them—and as much as Ricki wanted that too—I couldn’t abandon the people we loved. I had to check on them. There was no other way around it.

“Yes, son,” I told him. “I’m going out to check on
gramma.”

“You need me as a backup?”

I didn’t smile because he was serious. “No, stay here. Protect your mother.”

“She’s pretty tough. She doesn’t need me.”

Ricki was carrying another box down to the basement. She was out of earshot. “She needs you more than you’ll ever know,” I told him. “When I leave, you lock that door down there. Don’t let anyone in.”

“What about you?”

“Well, yeah, me,” I said, noticing and maybe not for the first time the platinum highlights in his hair he had gotten from his mother.

“Zombies can’t reason much, Dad. All they are is stupid eating machines,” Paul explained to me, an expert on the subject from all the zombie comics and paperbacks he devoured. “We’re going to need a password. They can’t think. If you get
zombified, you’ll never remember it. That’s how we’ll know you’re okay.”

Kids are amazing.
Absolutely amazing. I knew damn well that just about every adult (save the crazy ones) were scared shitless at that moment and I was, too…but kids, man, they reorient themselves so quickly it can be frightening. I was willing to bet that while most adults were ready to piss themselves, their kids were rising up to the challenge of the undead. Maybe that sounds silly, but I believed it. Kids are tougher and much more resourceful than adults. They are not so anchored to the physical reality of their world, they can adapt and improvise at the drop of a hat. You can spin their world 360° and they’ll come up standing. We adults would be thrown on our asses.

“What do you suggest?”

He scratched his tawny head. “Hmm. Didn’t you guys use passwords in Iraq?”

“Yeah, sometimes.”
I thought it over. “Zulu Foxtrot.”

“I like that!”

I explained it was military phonetics for Z and F, in other words, Zombie Free.

“Okay,” he said. “Watch it out there. Aim for the head.”

I gave him a hug which he did not appreciate—there’s no tougher soldier than a ten-year old fighting man—and went over to Ricki. I gave her a kiss and, surprisingly, she slipped her tongue in my mouth. “Give you a good reason to hurry back,” she said.

Paul had the TV going. “I’m setting up the
comm center, Dad,” he said.

“I’ll keep in touch with my cell. I should be back in half an hour,” I told them.

“Then what, Steve?” Ricki wanted to know.

“Then we hold out until this is sorted out.”

I wanted badly to tell her about what I’d seen in Iraq. But there wasn’t time and I didn’t want Paul knowing about it for some reason. Though, again, being a kid he would have probably just shrugged and said, “Gotta start somewhere, I guess.”

“Please be careful,” she said.

Then the door was closed and locked.

I wondered if I’d ever see them again.

I went up the steps and got my gun and went out into the world of the dead.

IMMEDIATE THREAT

In the thirty or so minutes I’d been in the house, the war—if that’s what you can call it—had not slowed down nor even taken a breath. In the distance I could hear gunfire, sirens, people shouting, and even a few thumping concussions like some real firepower
was being used. The sound of it brought back memories of the war. I saw no zombies in the streets. Maybe they had pushed on. Not that it gave me much hope, because what I saw was devastation, minor maybe, but ugly for America. There were bodies everywhere. Bodies of zombies. A couple half-eaten dogs. Cars were stalled in the middle of the avenue, doors opened. Their drivers were nowhere to be seen.

What else was nowhere to be seen was the body of the mailman.

All I found was a single blood-spattered shoe which was being investigated by a couple flies.

Could he have risen so fast?

I scanned around looking for trouble.

I had my old man’s gun, a Browning Hi-Power he had carried in Vietnam. I hadn’t used it in a couple of years and then only for target practice. But it would do the trick. As I moved up the sidewalk, I heard someone clear their throat.

“Where you going, Steve?” Jimmy LaRue asked. He was hanging out of a second story window with his .22.

I looked up at him. “I’m going to check on Carty.”

“You need me?”

“No, I can handle it,” I told him. “I got
Ricki and Paul barricaded in the basement. Keep an eye on my house, will you?”

“You got it. I’ll cover you.”

Jesus, it was insane. In a matter of hours our peaceful neighborhood was like something out of Fallujah. Here I was patrolling the streets with a sniper above keeping an eye out for unfriendlies. Hour by hour the entire thing was becoming more and more surreal. And scary. My natural paranoia was whispering in the back of my head and it kept saying things like: What if this situation is not containable? What if this zombie plague keeps rolling until there are no people left? I had to force that stuff from my head. When I was in the war, we’d go out on these mounted patrols to see if we could draw fire from insurgents so we could hunt them down and kick their asses. The Army called it “Pacification” but the bullet-eaters and grunts on the ground called it “pussification”. Pussifying the enemy. Our officers called it “movement to contact” and what it consisted of, basically, was exposing your ass to fire. Creep around in Stryker vehicles and see if any RPKs or RPGs opened up on us. Baiting, that’s all it was. Like hanging your dick in a piranha tank and seeing if you got any nibbles.

And that’s what it felt like I was doing right then: baiting the dead.

Like I was a hooker or something, trolling my wares and seeing if any righteous zombies wanted to take a bite.

It was insane, yes, but it was only the beginning of the madness. Just a delirium fever compared to where it was all going.

I made it over to Carty’s house. She lived next to Rommy Jacob, whom I knew was dead. I did a quick reconnoiter of Carty’s yard, made sure no bad boys were hanging around out by the garage or under the shade of the sour apple tree picking maggots from their teeth. There was nothing. That was good. But what was bad is that Carty’s back door was wide open.

Carty wouldn’t allow that.

Carty hated flies.

Swallowing, I entered the house silently.

Like a mouse into a shoe, I moved with stealth and silence. My throat was dry. It felt like it had been powdered down with beach sand. My heart was hammering, my knuckles white on the grip of the Browning.

Carty was laid up after knee surgery which was one of the reasons I thought I better check on her.

Years back Carty owned a saloon, but had sold it off after her husband died. In her eighties, she was very spry, full of wit, off-color jokes and salty metaphors. She could cuss like a sailor and took her bourbon in a water glass. She had an ongoing battle with old Mrs. Hazen and her goddamn flowers—her and her goddamn flowers, Steve, you know how fucking sick I am of hearing about those pissing flowers of hers? Bitch called the cops for chrissake because my leaves blew into her flowerbeds last fall, you believe that shit? You don’t hear Rommy bitching about it. Green goddamned thumb…I’d like to stick it so far up her ass she’d get a tickle in her throat—yeah, that was Carty.

I loved her like a mother.

She, along with Bill DeForest and his wife, had sort of adopted us when we moved into the neighborhood. I could remember the day we moved in. Bill and his wife had come over. Not to be undone, Mrs. Hazen had followed suit and brought us an apple pie. Very nice, I thought. But as I’d gotten to know her I realized the only reason for the kindness was to get a look at us so she could make some rash judgments as to the sort of people we were. Carty had brought no pies. She’d invited me in for a few fingers of Jim Beam. Told me if she were forty years younger, Ricki would have been in trouble, big trouble, because she would have stolen me away.

I felt tears well in my eyes.

Because I knew what I was going to find.

Soon as I got in the living room, I smelled it.
That heady, metallic, almost savage stink of human blood. The living room was a mess—lamps knocked over, magazines scattered, end tables overturned.

Carty had two Chihuahuas. Nice dogs. Liked to bark a lot, but they were harmless creatures.
Pathetic, really. Shivering and shaking, prone to colds and infections of all sorts. Bred by man to be pretty much shit useless in the real world.  Mimi and Momo. When I got into the living room, I called out to them. The very fact that they had not barked told me all I really needed to know about their fate.

I found them first.

I could never tell them apart and less so in death. One of them was mangled in a red-stained heap in the corner. There was a bloody splatter mark about three feet up as if somebody had picked the poor thing up and hurled it with serious velocity at the wall. I found the other one lying at the foot of Carty’s rocking chair. It was nearly bitten in half.

“Carty?” I called out, just sick to my stomach.

Nothing.

I pressed my fingers against the kitchen door.
Pushed it open.

Carty was sprawled on the floor in jogging pants and a collegiate sweatshirt that read UBP, and beneath that, UNIVERSITY OF BIG PECKERS. Something had been at her and she’d been bitten repeatedly in the face, the throat, the wrists,
the belly. She was almost unrecognizable such was the severity of the attacks. Her face was a bleeding, livid bruise.

An ocean of blood had spread around her corpse.

It was nearly dry. That made me think that Carty had been one of the first.

I can’t say that she was eaten exactly. It was more like whoever had done it just kept biting her until she bled out. It seemed inconceivable, but if somebody had asked me what had happened to her I would have had to tell them she had been bitten to death.

There was nothing more to see.

I turned away and went back in the living room. I pulled out my cell and called
Ricki. “Carty’s gone,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

And it was as I stuck the cell back in the pocket of my carpenter jeans that I heard something. A noise from behind me that made a cold chill run up my spine and play down my arms: a wet, sticky sort of sound. Like somebody peeling up a rag that had been stuck to the floor.

That’s what I heard.

As I turned, the Browning shaking in my fist, the kitchen door swung open and Carty was standing there. Her left eye was that same glossy white as I’d seen in the other walking corpses, her right eye glazed and staring off at the wall. Beneath the bruising and the bloodstains, her face was
a cool porcelain white. The left side of her mouth was hitched-up in a cadaverous grin, all teeth and gums.

“Carty,” I said.

A couple flies buzzed about her face. She paid them no mind. Things like that no longer bothered her. She was driven now by forces that knew only appetite.

She shuffled forward, her hands coming up like she wanted to caress me.

“Please, Carty,” I said. “Just go away.”

I tried backing towards the door but she followed me like my own shadow. I told myself this wasn’t Carty any more than that dead thing in
Rommy Jacob’s backyard had been Bill DeForest. She came at me. Her mouth was open. Her lips had pulled back from the gums. Her teeth looked almost unnaturally long and white.

But what made me bring up the Browning was that she was drooling.

She was drooling for my flesh.

Biting down on my lower lip, I sighted in on her forehead. “I’m sorry, Carty,” I said, and squeezed the trigger. The round was neat, efficient. It popped a nickel-sized
hole dead-center of her forehead. Something sprayed out of the back of her skull. She dropped and hit the floor like a stunned steer, legs bicycling for a moment and then she stiffened up and was dead again. I felt a wave of remorse wash through me. But I had no business feeling anything: it wasn’t Carty. It was walking meat. It was an abomination. Yet, my eyes were wet when I walked out of her house. It felt like something was stuck in my throat.

Outside, I had to sit on the porch a moment and catch my breath.

The streets were silent.

I heard plenty of commotion, but there on Holly Street, the hub of my little world, there was nothing.

I didn’t waste any time. I went back home.