World of Ashes (13 page)

             
“Maybe they’re not authorized to talk.” Someone suggested.

             
“Yeah, right…” Kenly took the microphone. “This is the North Sullivan checkpoint to the Texan patrol on top of the hill. Please respond.” Nothing. “This is Mayor Aaron Kenly, please respond.” Again, nothing. “Be advised, if you cannot respond via radio, flash your lights so that we know you have received our signal. We are not, I repeat, are not hostile. We’re all Americans here.”

             
That was all the truck needed to hear, and it back off, gone over the horizon without a word. “We really need a fucking helicopter.” Ethan and Kenly said at the same time.

             
“There’s one at the airport.” A Civil Air Patrol senior member suggested. “It’s not anything special, just one of those little bubble canopy private choppers. You know, the ones that everyone keeps crashing.”

             
Kenly raised an eyebrow, “I see. What about the fixed wing aircraft? Any of them still work?”

             
“Well, I’d assume all of them, Sir. The Army shut the airport down to civilian traffic, including us. We really haven’t been out there much to check on it.”

             
“Yeah, we really need to go do that.”

3

“No rebels shall be allowed to remain at Davis Mill so much as an hour. Allow them to go, but do not let them stay. And let it be known that if a farmer wishes to burn his cotton, his house, his family, and himself, he may do so. But not his corn. We want that.” ~General William Tecumseh Sherman

              There were vagrants at the airport, people who weren’t helping the town and had no intention of doing anything more than meth and copious amounts of drinking. A couple of them were armed and claimed the property as their own. It only took the town’s convoy of gun trucks showing up to convince them leaving was the right thing to do. One of the storage areas had been made into a makeshift field hospital, which had been abandoned as quickly as the Soldiers could leave it. The junkies had made use of all the fun drugs in the lockers, but left most of the equipment alone.

             
After the vagrants had disappeared over the hills most of the deputies returned to town. A spotter on the water tower reported more smoke from St. Louis’ general direction, and the newly elected mayor had to leave the checkpoint to calm some of the people who feared another wave of zombies. Keith, Allen and Ethan and a few others chose to stay for a little while, exploring the small regional airfield. The senior CAP officer showed them the building they used for meetings, which now smelled of backed up toilets and a half burned meth lab. It would take weeks for the two HAZMAT trained firefighters they still had to clean the building.

The runway was
divided in half for storage and Containerized Housing Units and connexes filled with supplies. It was shortened further by temporary hangars that had once housed half a dozen Apache gunships and twice as many Blackhawks. Only one Blackhawk remained, and it had obviously been cannibalized for parts.

“Should we even try to get a helo in the air?” Keith asked Ethan, looking around.

              “I don’t think we should even try.” A deputy said, pointing to a dust covered monitor. “This is a radar screen for local airspace. Look at that,” He used an ink pen to point to something. “At fifty thousand feet we’ve got air cover. Speed and formation would suggest military. I don’t see anything else in the sky but them.”

             
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Another deputy argued.

             
“Deputy Angelico is right. We shouldn’t put anything in the air if there’s still an Air Force to enforce the no-fly zones. A time of war would be grounds to shoot down a kite.” Keith said, ending the argument. “Now… there’s a lot of fuel and ammunition here. We need to take it all back to town and stash it. Winter is going to be a bitch this year, and we need to horde as much fuel as possible. So let’s get back to the truck stop, get some of the empty tanker trucks and get back here as fast as we can.”

             
Ethan stepped in before Keith’s momentum failed. “Three of you need to stay here and guard the place. We’ll leave a gun truck for you.”

Later that day the internet failed for most homes and the electricity went off for
the rest of the afternoon. The phones rang at least twenty different houses, but there was no one speaking on the other end. Something that sounded like a fax machine made noises, which a few people had the presence of mind to record. More evidence was mounting that they were being probed, but was it by the Texans, or by someone else? The Zombies were also probing the town’s defenses. It wasn’t a coordinated thing, because zombies can’t communicate, but some Zims would figure out not to attack the same place twice if they weren’t put down.

The number of “strays” wandering into the perimeter increased heavily. So much so that they had
to abandon the airport and the Japan checkpoints temporarily as herds of migrating zombies passed through. Ammunition was beginning to run low and the stench of the bodies already euthanized was overwhelming, the flies at epidemic levels Ethan hadn’t seen since Iraq. Despite heavy equipment to dig graves, the flow of bodies often outpaced the town’s digging capabilities. Attacks increased tenfold, the bulk of the dead from St. Louis and the surrounding areas had finally reached this far South, making the initial attacks seem like small skirmishes. It occurred to Lieutenant Reynolds they should begin checking the bodies for ID, for future reference at least. It might also give them a clue as to the migratory patterns of the undead.

Many people were saving their higher caliber ammunition
for hunting and defense, resorting to shooting the infected with .22 caliber rifles at much closer range. Some had even given up on guns altogether as ammunition became as scarce as it had under the last Administration. Some, like Ethan and Mayor Kenly, were known to carry replica cap and ball pistols when not on duty, just to save cartridge ammunition. Others carried medieval style weapons, including a market rush on compound bows and specialized hunting arrows. Some folks were taking playing
Zombies and Indians
a little too seriously, Ethan thought.

Newton
had suggested a chain link fence around the town, he and Reynolds had been spending their spare time at the police station building a “sand table” replica of the town. They’d used plastic barbed wire from a package of toy soldiers to represent the fence. It wouldn’t stop living people, probably barely slow them down, but it would hang the zombies up long enough for regular patrols to euthanize them. The only problem with the plan was the town’s boarders were massive. They didn’t have enough fencing in the city limits, which meant they’d need to go scavenge it from the highways and nearby towns. Most of it came from along the service roads and abandoned schools. The armed escorts of Deputies were wildly successful, and gathering supplies went faster now that the civilians felt safer.

New tactics for drawing the undead out into the open for easy kills evolved rapidly. Zim was attracted to anything that sounded intentional, any movement that was fluid or directed, and anything that didn’t smell like it was already dead.
Stories of people covering themselves in rotten entrails to escape herds of zombies abounded, and anyone with any common sense carried a small cassette deck they could turn on and leave as a decoy for Zim.

“We’re running out of time before fall comes.” Ethan said quietly one day. “This fence is taking away manpower from s
cavenging food and setting up personal greenhouses for the winter.”

“What if we just asked those guys at
the power plant for aid?” Kenly suggested, puffing on a pipe, a habit Ethan thought he wouldn’t mind taking up. “They certainly haven’t been hostile, it might not be the worst idea we ever had. If they can provide coal for power and their own protection, surely they can help fellow Americans with food and medicine.”

“Wh
at if they
are
hostile?” Rowe shook her head. “I think we can just live without them, personally. If they haven’t bothered to contact us by now, then they are not interested in us at all.”

“We should consider looting some of th
e larger towns.” Allen changed the subject. Keith had been teaching the boy and his brother Jimmy how to look and act like officers and gentlemen. Their parents didn’t seem interested in parenting anymore, and hadn’t left their house in months. The depression of losing their first born had wrecked them. “We haven’t gotten any refugees from the North in weeks. I think they’ve all left.”

“Or they’ve all
hunkered down, same as us.” Kenly said. “Look, boy, we’re busy. Find something else to do and lets the adults handle this.”

“I don’t know who the
fuck you think you are, you simple fat fuck, but you had bettered show some fucking respect.” Ethan’s glair was murderous, he wasn’t beyond punching the mayor in the face with brass knuckles. Kenly didn’t say anything. He just puffed on his pipe and walked away, satisfied that he could trust Ethan to stick up for those under his care.

“We’ll check the la
rger towns soon.” Keith offered, trying to distract Ethan from opening a can of whoopass on Kenly. “For now, let’s keep working on shoring up our defenses.”

The next night
at shift change at the police station, Kenly arrived to give new orders to his men. Some were assigned to protecting the town and maintaining law and order while others were ordered to plan raiding parties to loot local towns for winter supplies. Keith, Ethan and Allen were given the very specific mission of returning to the Labodie Power Plant to gather more intelligence and possibly make contact if the opportunity arose. Early in the morning, long before the sun came up, they prepped and fueled their truck. Allen, apparently having recently gained a girlfriend, kissed her goodbye out of earshot and climbed into the turret. Ethan watched and couldn’t help but let his jealously rage inside. He may never again hold Nicole. Smell her hair, hear her voice. He’d take an argument with her if only he could see her one more time. How horrible would that be, to spend every night alone in the cold for the rest of his predictably shortened life?

The trip back to the power plant
didn’t take as long this time because Ethan decided to drive along the railroad tracks. The ride was bumpy and miserable, the M1114 built for taking IEDs, not for any measure of comfort. There were very few zombies on the back roads and none on the tracks, most roaming the open highways and traffic snarls or wherever people had been gathered. What was most disturbing was the ever decreasing signs of living people. Around a corner Keith almost plowed headlong into a freight train that was stopped and hidden behind a row of trees, effectively camouflaging it, but also blocking their path along the tracks. Unwilling to give the train’s location over the radio, lest someone overhear them, they marked it on a map and drove around it, almost becoming bogged down in a small creek and hedge row because Ethan wasn’t a spectacular driver.

Who would be able to steal a freight train in a couple hours?
Ethan laughed inside. The dead, their vacant and glossy eyes always watching, seemed too badly decomposed to steal a train. The thought of rotting corpses driving a train made Ethan giggle out loud, but the engine was too noisy for Keith or Allen to hear him. Those zombies who could still use their ears, if they hadn’t been eaten off or already rotted away, would turn toward the sound of the Humvee’s engine as they passed, but didn’t bother to change direction. The virus, though obviously unaware of itself as a microorganism, seemed to instinctually know it’s hosts were dying out. Perhaps that was one of the Envier Virus’ key features, that the hosts would only attack to spread the virus when it detected an available body. This would require some research.

Only one
Zim on the trip there had been fresh, and instead of making noise with a gun Keith had Ethan run the college age kid over with a thud noise they were no stranger to. The truck’s brush guard would be a real pain to wash off later, some rotted goo and teeth were plastered to it.

Ethan looked over at Keith when he heard laughing over the radio. “
WTF, Over?
”

Keith smiled and laughed harder, “
Fuckin’ Emo kids man. You’d think I’d hate all zombies equally, but here I am, hunting effeminate dorks even after they’ve died.
” He laughed some more.

“
You’re my kind of sick.
” Ethan smiled a little too, wondering to himself where the kid had been hiding for so long, only to become infected now. The reigning theory for fresh zombies were people running out of supplies and being killed while scavenging. Not everyone was fit to survive in a world without their iCrap telling them what to do.

The tracks le
d where they wanted to go, even though it was mid-afternoon before they arrived. Empty train cars littered unused tracks, some tipped over where bulldozers had shoved them off the tracks to make room for more train cars. The massive amount of cars blocked the best ways in, but provided almost complete defilade from the guard towers. They could see through their binoculars the dirt road they’d taken originally had been cleared of trees and brush, exposing the entire area to a machine gun nest on top of the power plant. It would be unwise to take that route again, who knew if the Texan’s actions were because they somehow knew they were being spied on from there or not. They’d probably planted more mines too.