Z-Burbia 3: Estate Of The Dead (5 page)

“Not today, sweetie,” Stella says. “You and your brother have chores. The house needs to be cleaned.”

“Seriously? That’s bullshit,” Greta snaps. “We’re always cleaning the house! What do you do? Just sit on the couch and...”

“I’d stop there,” I say, seeing the look on my wife’s face. “Greta? Go get your brother and start cleaning.”

“It’s like ninety degrees in here!” she shouts. “I’ll die!”

“Then you’ll come back as a Z and I’ll kill you,” Elsbeth says.

Silence.

“I’ll get Charlie,” Greta says and tucks away quickly.

“Thanks, El,” Stella says, “she needed a swift kick like that.”

“What?” Elsbeth asks. “I didn’t say I’d kick her, I said I’d kill her.”

“Right,” Stella smiles, “whatever, it worked. Jace?”

“Getting clean then we are out of here,” I say, leaning over the couch and kissing her. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

***

Melissa Billings, our head of the scavenging crew, drives the four door pickup truck as we wind up Elk Mountain Road on our way to the Grove Park. I sit up front with her while Elsbeth sits in the back seat and her eyes watching the empty houses zip by. The truck bed is filled with heavily armed men and women, part of Lourdes’s crew. They accompany everyone everywhere. It’s greatly reduced the casualty rate that can get kinda high in the zombie apocalypse.

Melissa keeps glancing at me out of the corner of her eye and it’s really bugging the shit out of me.

“What?” I ask. “Out with it.”

“We have to make a detour,” she says. “Need to pick someone up.”

“Pick someone up? Who? There’s nothing between here and the Grove Park except… No. No fucking way.” I shake my head like a three year old having a tantrum. “No, no, no. I’ll kill the bitch.”

After my
shower, I switched up my prosthetic and put on my “in the field” arm. It’s a long spike, deadly sharp at the end. Mr. Spikey. If we get in the shit then I’m ready to brain some Zs. It’s not an easy thing to do, but I’ve gotten pretty good with it. I hold up Mr. Spikey and wave it by Melissa’s face.

“I. Will. Stab. Her,” I say.

Elsbeth snickers from the back seat. I turn on her, pissed. She glares. I turn back, not quite as pissed.

“They are putting the last touches on their fortifications,” Melissa says, ignoring my hissy fit. “She can get away for the meeting, but can’t spare any of her people.”

“Her people?” I snort. “Fucking dipshits.”

Brenda Kelly
, the former Chairperson of the Whispering Pines HOA. Stella took her job. It was a bloodless coup, done all democratic like and all.

But that woman…

She’s a squat, ugly, goblin-beast of a bitch. The woman is pure evil, in my honest opinion. She colluded with Vance, but still got reelected because of fear and stupidity. It wasn’t until Stella stepped up and took over that she lost her power base. But, being an evil twat, she quickly found a new power base.

The laborers. The slaves that were brought to Asheville by Anthony Mondello (I refuse to call him the POTUS) and Ms. Foster (Lourdes’s former boss) to rebuild and secure the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Most of the laborers decided to stick around and stay at the Grove Park Inn. The problem is that so did the private military contractors, or PCs that had been their guards and captors. Tension is an understatement. And Brenda Kelly (did I mention the evil twat part?) grabbed onto that tension and pulled hard.

She quickly got a faction of laborers to back her and make a move to take over Reynolds Mountain. Years before Z-day, Reynolds Mountain was a planned development in Woodfin/North Asheville. A mix of “upscale” shops and cafes at the base with a luxury, private neighborhood overlooking it from the mountain above. They have spent the past few months
fortifying the development, keeping the Zs at bay. It’s like a version of Whispering Pines, but with marble countertops and bidets.

“You’re just pissed because you didn’t think of it,” Melissa says, echoing my thoughts perfectly.

She’s right. I am pissed. I want marble countertops. I could do without the bidets. Never could figure that shit out. I mean, what do you do afterwards? Drip dry? It’s all so confusing!

“Am not,” I lie.

“Get over it, Jace,” Melissa says. “Is she an evil twat? Yes.” Ha! Told ya! “But she has a right to be a part of Asheville, just like all of us. As long as she doesn’t try anything.”

“And that’s the real problem,” I snap. “Eventually she will try something. That’s what evil twats do!”

“They also stink,” Elsbeth says.

“What?” I ask.

She waves her hand in front of her nose. “Evil twats stink. Smelly pussy.”

Melissa tries to keep it under control, but she bursts out laughing. I shake my head and smile then start laughing too.

“What?” Elsbeth frowns. “Don’t laugh at me? You laugh at me too much.”

“No, no, darling,” Melissa says
, “I’m not laughing at you. You just crack me up sometimes, okay? That’s a good thing.”

Elsbeth smiles. “Okay. Good.”

Mood swings don’t even begin to describe the woman sitting behind me…

We cross over I-26 and I look down at the interstate below. The Zs are back. For a
while, they had been cleared out by Vance, corralled into a massive pen he made out of draining Beaver Lake. We killed those after I took Vance down. But, Zs have some semblance of the habits of their old lives and always congregate in places they may have frequented when alive. It didn’t take long before other Zs made their way to their asphalt altar. Says a lot about our former commuter society, doesn’t it?

Instead of going straight onto
Lakeshore Drive, Melissa turns left onto Woodfin Ave, heading to Reynolds Mountain. My gut clenches, as do my fists, but I keep it under control. Kinda have to with the gut clench or I’ll shit myself. That’s never fun. Trust me.

We have to cross Merrimon Ave and then drive through the old Reynolds Village. I used to go to the YMCA there. What? I went there. Twice. Shut up.

The road twists through a thick woods of pine before we come to a massive set of wooden gates. Huh, wonder where she got that design from? Gate design stealing twat.

Up, up, up we go. Some residents wave at us, recognizing Melissa’s truck. Some just stare, not trusting anyone that isn’t a direct neighbor. More than a few flip us off. Okay, they flip me off. I’m not exactly a favorite in these here parts.

I don’t even acknowledge the woman when we pull up to the fucking mansion she’s taken as her home. I guess she does share it with her right hand, Mindy Sterling, who used to be the Head of Security for Whispering Pines. Elsbeth’s manfriend, Julio, has taken that duty since Mindy decided to keep her nose wedged up her boss’s ass.

“Hey, Jace,” Mindy says to me then shuts up as she gets a death glare from Brenda.

The two women pull their collective bulks into the back with Elsbeth. Melissa just nods at them then pulls away.

“What do you think of our fortifications, Mr. Stanford?” Brenda asks as the massive gate closes behind us, shutting the development off from the rest of the Z infested world. “I’m sure it’s not up to your brilliant standards, but we haven’t had a breach yet.”

I grunt.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Brenda sneers. Not that I see the sneer since I’m focusing on the road in front of us and refuse to turn and look at her. But I hear that sneer. That snippy, smarmy sneer…

We pull out onto Merrimon Ave and drive south towards the Grove Park. Everyone sits in silence. Mindy tries to make conversation, but every time she opens her mouth, Elsbeth turns to her and frowns. She shuts up.

Our phones chime. All of our phones. Landon has been busy making sure the
Wi-Fi is city wide. Solar batteries and routers everywhere.

“LAKE JULIAN UNDER SIEGE! ALL HANDS NOW!”

“Fuck,” I say. The power plant.

Albert Shumway, a muscled fireplug that works under
Lourdes’s supervision has spent months retrofitting the Lake Julian power plant from coal into natural gas, which luckily we are flush with in Asheville. He’s an ornery asshole and we haven’t gotten along well, but he does know his power plants. He’s made a lot of progress with getting us closer to city wide power.

If the Zs would leave the plant the fuck alone.

For some reason, and none of us can figure out what it is, the Zs like the power plant. They migrate there in hordes. Thirty, forty, fifty at a time they show up. Half the week is spent killing Zs and not working on the plant.

It sounds like
there’s more of a herd this time than a horde.

“Status?” I text back.

“FUCK YOUR STATUS, STANFORD! I NEED EVERYONE HERE NOW! FUCKING HERD!”

I was right. Not that I want to be right about this. I like being right in Trivial Pursuit,
not about civilization-crushing Z herds.

“Looks like the meeting is postponed,” Melissa says as she floors it.

“What?” Brenda screeches (it’s her default tone). “You aren’t dropping us at the Grove Park?”

Melissa hooks a thumb at the men and women in the bed of the truck. “Everyone means everyone, Brenda. It doesn’t mean make a pit stop to let you out so you can lounge by the pool.”

“Oh,” Mindy says. I guess she had planned on lounging by the pool.

“Well, don’t expect me to fight,” Brenda says. “I’m a leader, not a fighter.”

“You’re a slug,” Elsbeth says.

Brenda starts to reply then realizes who she is replying to and shuts the fuck up right quick.

“You know where Stuart is?” Melissa asks.

“Nope,” I say. “I’ll try to find out. We’ll need him.”

“He’s with Julio,” Elsbeth says.

“He is?” I ask. “How do you know?”

I look over my shoulder and she just stares at me.

***

When Z-Day hit it was a Sunday.

The day is only significant because on the Biltmore Estate, that’s a busy day. Thousands of tourists crowded the sprawling house, and surrounding grounds of one of America’s former families of robber baron royalty
. The Vanderbilts.

For some inexplicable reason, the management of the estate decided to lock down everything when the dead began to rise. They closed and barred the gates, barricaded access roads, fenced o
ff bridges. There was no way in or out.

Did they get a heads up? Did someone say, “Hey, zombie apocalypse! Eve
ryone’s sleeping here tonight!”

No one knows because within days the place was nothing but a nest of Zs.

Odds are someone had a heart attack and it all went downhill from there. One guy gets up a little peckish for human flesh and pretty soon it’s the meme of the day to eat your friends, family, fellow flabby tourists.

Whatever the circumstances, the Biltmore Estate pretty much stayed off limits to the survivors of Asheville. Why would anyone even bother when faced with a sea of undead shambling around the grounds? And there is a sea of them. Thousands standing in the fields, their moans and groans, hisses and snarls echoing about the landscape. They just stand there. Waiting…

“What are they waiting for?” Julio asks as he lowers his binoculars. “They don’t leave the estate. Just hang out in the fields.”

His companion grunts, but doesn’t lower his binoculars.

“I don’t think they can move,” Stuart says.

“Come again?” Julio asks.

The two men are perched on a hill that overlooks the estate. They have a good view of the many fields and gardens that once grew corn and wheat, pastured beef and dairy cows, and each season flourished with a multitude of wildflowers.

“They move
,” Julio says.

“No
, they don’t,” Stuart says. “They move their arms, and some move a leg back and forth, but none of them actually leave where they are standing.” He lowers his binoculars and rubs at the bridge of his nose. “It’s like they are glued into place.”

Julio has another look and frowns. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.
I never noticed that. I assumed they were just doing that Z thing where they stare at shit until some asshole comes along and gets them worked up.”

“That’s not an accident,” Stuart says
, “someone put them there.”

“Nah, man, they were already there,” Julio says, studying the tattered and shredded clothing that still dangles from many of the Zs.

Wearing remnants of their former lives, they are covered in t-shirts with logos from their favorite bands, sports teams, universities, bulky sweatshirts with majestic eagles, grizzly bears, monster trucks, couture and faux couture blouses and jeans.

A slice of 21
st
century fashion pre-Z.

“I mean that someone placed them where they stand,” Stuart says. “Moved them from where they were wandering about the estate and into their current positions.”