ZWD: King of an Empty City (24 page)

As a precaution, Donny stuffed a shirt he’d found into Razorback Girl’s mouth and then secured it there with a belt. The first thing I wanted Ashley to look at was the eyes. We had to clear the room of most of the kids before she’d operate, but when she cut into the eyes I wished I’d left as well. In any horror movie I’m fine with all the gore and guts, but mess with the eyes and I get queasy. So when she cut into the eyes and this slimy, thick white milky fluid drained out, I almost blew chunks across the room. I had to leave for a moment and go out the back door to get some fresh air as she removed the other eye and started to examine it. I searched my pockets for a cigar before I remembered that I’d given them up. I’d have to grab another pack tonight when we went back to the tent. Eddie joined me outside and asked, “What do you hope to find from all this?”

              “Anything that will help us understand these things better. Information is a powerful thing, remember that.”  

              “So understanding what makes them work will help us out in the long run?”

              “Something like that.”

              “Does that work in every case?”

              “Not always.”

              “The black truck?”

              “I’ve been trying to figure those guys out for days. I can’t get into their heads. Why?”

              “That note you left them, the one we found. What were you going to talk to them about?”

              “Like I said, some sort of truce. When we wrote that note I didn’t know about all you guys. Now that I do, it changes everything.”

              “So what are you thinking? About the truck?”

              “I still think I need to at least talk to them, get a sense of who they are, what motivates them. It might give me some understanding about the kind of people we’re dealing with.”

              “I think we’re going to have to kill them,” Eddie said somberly.

              “You’re probably right, but I need to try.” It pained me to think a kid could be so cold-blooded in his thinking.

              “Got a plan for that?’

              “I got something in mind. It involves moving some more cars.”

              “I enjoyed that, I’m in.” He pulled out some cheese sticks and beef jerky that were packaged together and offered me half. My stomach was still queasy from the eyeball thing. I doubted that I’d be able to eat for a few hours, or at least until the memory of that left my mind, which could be years from now.

While Eddie snacked, we walked around the backyard and talked about other things, then we slipped into the front yard and went around the block. You could hear the whining capacitor even a block away, if you really listened. I called over one of the lookouts who was hiding in the bushes of a house on the corner and told him to go out as far as he could still hear that whine, then report back to us. We stayed there and waited, probably an hour before he returned. He came back from the opposite side from which he left and reported that he could hear it seven or eight blocks away in any direction, depending on how many trees or houses were in between. So, a seven-block radius around this house reached Roosevelt Road and took up at least a sixth of the neighborhood I’d claimed as mine when I was king.

              We headed back to the house where everyone was waiting on Ashley to finish, and as we walked I thought about Roosevelt and the places south of it. Even before the zombies, that was a questionable place. We’d have to block off the entrance from there next. No easy task; in fact, it would be harder than blocking off the bridges. That would be ten blocks, including yards, to seal off, and I didn’t see a way to pull that off right now. I knew this time we were going to take our time and gather the cars we needed and park them on the Broadway Plaza Shopping Center lot, where the Save-A-Lot grocery used to be, before we started blocking streets. No doubt about it, everything we needed would be gathered in one spot before we had another disaster like the one we had downtown.                  

              In the house Ashley was just washing up at the kitchen sink. Bobby looked worried as we stepped into the kitchen. Ashley turned. “A word with you in private, please,” she demanded, so we stepped into the bathroom and turned on the fan.

                  The bathroom was, like many of the bathrooms in these old Victorian houses, once a room used for something else before it was converted. The room was spacious and covered with white subway tiles with a black one thrown in at random intervals. There was a good five feet separating the door from the sink and hardly any space between the toilet and the shower. A wood panel half-wall separated the toilet from the view of the doorway. I sat down on the rim of the giant claw-foot bathtub and waited for her to speak. She splashed more water on her face at the sink, and then turning to me very calmly, she said, “Are you insane?” It wasn’t what I was expecting.

              “Help me out here with that and narrow it down a bit, I got a lot of things going on,“ I said.

              “You want to put a kid in charge as president?”

              “Oh, that insane idea. Yes.” My answer obviously startled her. I knew I couldn’t tell her that it was all the idea of my dead friends and a zombie or two whose names I didn’t know. I had to come up with a reason to want to do this that made rational sense to a sane adult. I didn’t have one, so I just started talking and hoped I’d stumble upon something that would convince her it was a good idea. “He’s a smart kid,” I started.

              “Yes, he’s very smart, but you want to put our future in his hands?”

              “You make it sound like it’s a bad thing.”

              “Is it good?”

              “I think so.”                  

              “Ok, I’m listening. Tell me why,” she said, frowning.

              “Ok, let’s put the basic argument that children are the future of our country aside for now. These kids already look to him as a leader. There isn’t much choice in the matter. He’ll be leader eventually. After we’re gone, they’ll go straight back to him. So why not let him lead now and teach him how to be a good leader? Or, let him become a dictator who’s immature and rules these kids by fear the way all the modern dictators have? We have a perfect model of government with our own old constitution. I don’t know how many people are out there still alive, but we can take those we have here and start anew. We can set up a congress that will counterbalance his decisions. We can set up a supreme court to decide whose laws are final. We can re-start what the Founding Fathers wanted in the beginning. Is it going to be perfect? Hell, no. It wasn’t the first time around. But we can’t stay living like animals hiding in our homes and scavenging for food at night. And the longer he has to practice this, the better president he’ll be.”

I thought it was a very weak argument myself when I finished it, but it was all I had. Ashley leaned against the sink and looked at the floor for a long while with her arms folded across her chest.

“Ok, I can see where you’re going with this. But presidents only serve four years. You sound like you plan on setting him up for a long time as president.”

              “It’s a work in progress. But for now, I’m the interim president till he takes over.”

              “And how long will you be interim?”

              “Like I said, it’s a work in progress. Let’s say four years. That will give him some time to age, to learn. Then he does four years and hopefully a second term, and by then we’d have someone else to take the job. I don’t know.”

              “This is a deadly game you’re playing with everyone’s lives.”

              “And zombies aren’t? At least I’m looking for the future, trying to come up with something that beats our present, and I’m open to suggestions if you got any. Are you with us on this?”

              “I want to be part of the cabinet.”

              “You got it.”

I stood up and stretched. The rim of the tub was making my butt fall asleep. There was a moment of dizziness and another flush of heat spread over me. It only lasted for a moment and was gone. “Are you ready to tell us what you found out about the zombies?” I asked, moving for the door.

              “I guess so. Let me wash my hands and I’ll be right there.”

              “Ok, I’ll meet you in the war room/kitchen.” A little later Ashley joined us in the kitchen, where we were all gathered around Razorback Girl’s body. Ashley stepped up to the table with a towel, still drying her hands, when she started.

              “The eyes, we know, are dead. But, even as long as they’ve been dead, the iris still seems functional. I can’t be certain about this because I’m not a doctor and we need a ‘live’ one to compare her to. She’s starting to show the normal signs of decomposition you’d see in a body that was dead for two or three days after rigor.”

              “So they’re decaying?” I asked.

              “Yes, but very, very slowly.”

              “Tell us more about the eyes.”

              “I’m no eye doctor, keep that in mind, but eyes are made mostly of water and hers are drying up.”

              “Like normal decomp?”

              “Much slower.”

              “What about her ears? How are they working?”

              “Ears are made mostly of bone and cartilage, so her ears are working fine. What are you trying to get at?”

              “The zombies are going blind. If what you say is true, their eyes are rotting out and they can’t see like they used to. Isn’t it true that when you lose one of your senses, others take over or become more acute?”

“Yes, it’s one of the reasons blind people get around as well as they do. They can kind of hear where objects are or aren’t by the way sound bounces off obstacles.”

“So it stands to reason that zombies who were once human would do something similar?”

             
“Yes, that stands to reason, as well as the fact that we have zombies.”

Donny’s face lit up and he exclaimed, “So as they go blind they have to hunt us by sound. That’s why they came to the house next door, because they heard the whine from the alarm.”

Steve interjected, “That’s why they were so easy to kill in the yard. They couldn’t see us and they couldn’t hear us.”

“But we have to really listen for that whine,” Eddie said, “And they seem to come from miles around listening to it. It’s like they have hearing like dogs.”

My girl, the Commander, stood up and walked over to Razorback Girl. “You’re missing the point here, people. If the zombies are going blind and they rely on sound to hunt, our lives just got easier.”

              “How so?” asked Eddie.

              “You ever been around one of those cars that has the bass thumping so loud you can feel it in your chest? You can’t hear the person next to you talking? Imagine you’re a zombie, hungry, blind, and you can smell food nearby but you can’t see it or hear it. How are you going to catch it?” she offered. It took a moment, but you could see each face light up with realization of what this meant for us. With sight gone, the only two senses left were sound and smell. We could mask sound and I was sure we could mask smell as well. In fact, since they were drawn to sounds like moths to flames, we wouldn’t have to go hunting them; we just had to make noise and let them come to us.

             
“As long as that capacitor is whining next door, we can train everyone on how to kill zombies, and when that finally goes out, we can set up a new killing field and start again. Donny, have your scouts start looking for a new place. Somewhere near I-630. We need a place where we can dispose of the bodies and a safe place for the troops to gather nearby. Someplace where we can control the flow of zombies from I-630 would be ideal. We need to go after them now.”

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 24

ZWD: Dec. 19.

Planning for the future, making a home for the refugees we knew would come. And trapped like rats.

It wasn’t long after our meeting that we decided to break it up for the night and head back to our various places. The kids were sent out in small groups headed back for Trinity Church. Ashley, Donny, Eddie, and we stayed at the house till last. Donny and Eddie were going to escort Ashley home. We still had a few things to talk about and didn’t need all the kids around. I was thinking about clearing out Paris Towers.

             
Paris Towers was an apartment building with at least thirteen floors that was assisted living housing in the middle of the Quapaw District, and it stuck out over the old Victorian gingerbread houses like a sore thumb.

             
But that was before the outbreak. Now Paris Towers stood there as thirteen stories of living dead. Sooner or later, we were going to have to clear it out. Sooner or later we were going to have to make it livable again. Because sooner or later people were, I was sure, going to need a decent place to live and refugees were going to come to us and we needed a place to put them. We talked about how to attack the tower, how to clean it out and when. After a few hours of talking about that and just talking we called it a night. Ashley, Donny, and Eddie left. We weren’t far behind them.

The world outside was almost surreal as we walked past the zombies gathered in the yard of the alarm house. They were so caught up in the whining sound they never heard us passing by. Looking at them standing there in the snow under the streetlights, they looked like some demented ghoulish Christmas decorations.

                We’d turned down Twenty-Third Street, making our way to Broadway and our tent on top of the Safeway. The fog and mist that hovered close to the ground, the snow still lightly falling, and the glow of the streetlights gave a sepia-toned look to the world as we walked along.

              “I think it’s going to work,” I said as we walked.

              “What’s going to work?” she asked, leaning into me.

              “This whole new world thing. I think it’s going to work. I think we’re going to be alright.”

As we crossed State Street, we could see down the road to Roosevelt Road and spotted a dark figure barely visible in the distance, staggering along the dimly-lit street. We thought it was a zombie looking for the alarm house and moved on. A block later on Gaines he was there again, staggering along.

“He moves wrong,” she said

              “You think he’s alive or dead?”

              “He might be alive.”

              “Why is he staggering?”

              “I don’t know. Maybe he’s hurt.”

I stepped into the center of the street and stood there motionless for a moment. The figure kept coming down the street towards us. Staggering from side to side. He was making a lot of noise over the fresh snow and we readied our weapons. Finally, he stopped a block away from us, standing there in the street near the far curb. I raised my hand over my head and spread my fingers wide, holding that position. He wavered, then brought up his arm the same way. He then spread his fingers wide and thrust his hand in the air and tried to spread his fingers even wider before falling to his knees, then face-first into the snow.

              “Well, he was alive,” she said, lowering her Ice Pike. “We better go finish him off.”

It seemed like the snow picked up or swirled around more because of the wind. When we got to the fallen figure he’d been trying to crawl into the yard of the nearest house. He was halfway over the two-foot-high retaining wall they had around their yard.

“Have you been bitten?” I asked, still a few feet away. When he turned his head to look at us, it was clear that he’d been beaten, if nothing else. He slid down the retaining wall and sat leaning against it.

“Help me,” he said, reaching out. He was a young black man who you could tell at one time had been a large man. He’d been starved, beaten, and tortured.

              “We’ll do what we can. What’s your name?”

              “What?”

              “What’s your name, what do we call you?”

              “Lonnie.”

              “What happened, Lonnie?” The parts of Lonnie’s face that weren’t bloodied and swollen were covered in pimples and the pockmarks of acne scars. He had a beard in patches. One eye was closed and caked with blood. His clothes hung off him like baggy sacks. His fists were cut up and covered in blood. Wherever he’d been, he had to fight his way out. He had on high-top tennis shoes that had seen better days, no socks, black pants, and a V-neck sweater that was ripped and torn from the recent fight.

              “They took me down and that’s when I fought.”

              “Who took you down from what?”

              “Them mens.”

              “Them mens, what men, Lonnie?”

              “Them mens what keep the monster, mens,” he said, gasping. We gave him some water. It was becoming clear that Lonnie was a little slow in the mind and we might not get much out of him. We started using snow to clean the blood off him as we asked him questions.

              “Do you mean the men in the black truck? Those men?”

              “Um-huh. They got a black truck. That’s what they took me and
Keeshie
ins.”             

               “Who’s
Keeshie?”

              “My sister. I was suppose to take care of her, but they was too big, too many. They took us in the truck and put us in the nets.”

              “Nets? Why did they put you in the nets, Lonnie?”

              “So’s the monster mens could chase us.”

              “Where is Keeshie now?”

              “She gone, she gone,” Lonnie cried, his entire body shaking. “The monster men finally caught her in the net. Now she one too.”

It took us a while to get Lonnie quiet. Like a little child, he suffered the discomfort of fighting back his sobs when we told him he needed to be quiet or the monster men would be coming for us again. He fell over to his side and buried his face in the snow to muffle his high moaning and blubbering. I desperately wanted him to stop, but I knew he needed to get this out.

She pointed to a spot on his back and pulled a glow stick out of her pocket. After snapping it with her thumb, she shook it up and let the chemicals inside come to life. Holding it over Lonnie’s back, it revealed that there was a large tear in the sweater and under it was a bloody wound with a tooth sticking out of it. Lonnie had been bitten. I’d liked him too.

              “Lonnie, Lonnie, sit up. I need to talk to you about some things and we don’t have much time. You’ve been bitten.”

The poor guy’s eyes got wide. He looked from her to me and back. He started rocking back and forth, hugging himself and looking at the sky. “What’s the date?” he asked.

              “The nineteenth,” she offered.

              “Six days till Christmas. You think I’ll know it’s Christmas when I become a monster mans? Do you think they know it’s Christmas? Do you think Keeshie know?”

              “Lonnie, it’s November,” I said.

              “No, it’s not. He’s right,” she interjected. “We’re six days from Christmas.”

I looked at her dumbfounded. How could I lose a month? My mind got stuck on this for a moment and I had a hard time getting back to Lonnie.

              “The Lord’s birthday. I want to see the Lord’s birthday,” he rambled on to himself.

Looking at me trying to absorb the fact that I’d lost a month, she said, “We’ll go over this later.” Turning to Lonnie, she tried to comfort him. “Honey, I’m sure you will. We’re going to do everything we can for you to make sure you see it. You have to answer some questions now. Can you do that for me?”

Absently he shook his head yes. “Lonnie, honey, why were you in a net? What were they doing with you?”

“There was these treadmills with the monster mens on them and we was hanging in the nets in front of the monster mens so they’d chase you. Sometimes they catch you like they did Keeshie. Then they put her on the treadmill and she chases someone else.” He shuddered.

              “Was she chasing you in your net?” she asked. He nodded. “Did she catch you, Lonnie?” He nodded again. “Then what happened?”

              “They lowered me to put the collar on so’s I could go to the treadmill. But I fought ’em and runs away.”

              “That was very brave of you, Lonnie. Where did you run from?”

Down the street near Roosevelt, we heard the rumble of the black truck’s engine and the crackle of its tires on the snow-covered roads. It was moving slowly, but not slowly enough. They’d be here in moments. “There’s blood over here, he turned up Gaines,” we heard a voice shout. The truck’s engine surged, and a man wearing boots and shorts with a heavy coat stepped into the glow under the streetlamp. He was a block away and his head was down, but I knew who he was. He wore a flat-top haircut and a long, pointed red beard that came down to his chest. I remembered seeing his picture now in the meth lab house just down from Ashley’s house. He was scum. As I thought these words his head popped up and he looked straight at me, as if he heard my thoughts. “There he is, and he has friends,” he shouted. The black truck roared around the corner and stopped next to him. Lonnie started crying and I couldn’t think of anything other than “How the hell does that bastard wear shorts in this weather?”

              “We can’t take them. We’re not ready,” she said.

              “What about Lonnie?” she shook her head. She was right, he was dead anyway.

              “Split up, rendezvous?” I asked. The big red-headed guy started running up the street towards us. The big burly black guy with the scruffy beard who was standing in the back of the truck the day they dragged the body behind them jumped out and started running behind him. The truck revved and started moving towards us as well.

              “North spot,” she said and gave me a quick kiss before standing. “I love you.” And she took off running. I wasn’t much further behind her. Like a fire escape plan where you pick a safe spot to meet after everyone gets out of the house, we’d picked weeks ago four rendezvous spots. Each of us would take a different path to get there and we gave ourselves two hours to do it. We thought there might be some time needed to hide and evade zombies or pursuers. Since we were in the south of our old kingdom, we’d head to the north rendezvous spot. We didn’t want to go straight to the base house or our tent home on top of the Safeway. We didn’t want to lead anyone directly to us anywhere. So separately we’d make our way to safety. At the corner of Gaines and Twenty-Third she went east and I went west.

I could hear the truck gaining speed. Behind me I heard a gunshot. I knew Lonnie was dead. I’d learned several rules from monster movies over the years. One of them is never look back, and I didn’t. As soon as I turned onto Twenty-Third I was running with everything I had. I cut through yards; I leapt over fences and scrambled through bushes. Always the truck seemed to be too close for comfort. When I stopped it stopped, as if it had this demonic ability to follow and find me wherever I went. In my head, I could hear Stager’s voice laughing, “
Run, rabbit, run.”
Fuck you, Stager! At one point, I was crouching down behind some holly bushes with my shirt covering my nose and mouth trying not to breathe out huffs of steam. The holly bush was sticking me in a thousand places but if I was hidden, I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of finding me. The black truck just sat there on the road. Engine idling, the driver opened his door and pulled out a spotlight powered by the cigarette lighter. He shone it on the ground and started following my tracks to the holly bush. When the light rested on the bush I prayed to God I was hidden well as it lingered. Then the light went to the other side of the bush and searched the ground.

The light came back and was shining in my eyes. “I know you're there. You have to be there, the tracks don’t go any farther, so you're there in the bush, aren’t you? Just staring at me. Wondering what to do next, am I right?” I knew my best hope was to cause doubt in his mind and do nothing. Hopefully he’d think he made a mistake and give me an opening to run. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and moved to the other side of the truck, my side of the truck, and leaned on the fender. From where I was I could smell the smoke and I had a wave of nausea and started sweating. “Why don’t you just come on out? It’s inevitable that eventually I’ll catch you. Who are you, anyway? One of those pesky kids playing Robin Hood, or are you this Cowboy I’ve been getting more and more pissed off at?” From the outline of his form from the light I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it. His spiky hair, the leather jacket. I knew he had a small soul patch on his chin and a gold chain around his neck. He was the leader of the black truck people. “Don’t feel like talking, that’s ok, because I don’t give a fuck what you have to say.” He reached into his leather jacket pocket and pulled out a gun and I sneezed.

              There was no use trying to hide now. I sprang to my feet and ran around the side of the house. One shot rang out and I heard it strike the wood of the house. The truck roared again behind me and I knew he was driving again. We were now on my old street and I felt I had the advantage. I knew the alleyways, the streets, and the houses. I knew most of the old owners and I knew the next block had an empty house that was open to the elements. The truck slid around the corner, passenger window down, music screaming from the speakers within. I ran up on a porch as a shot from the truck went wide and struck the brick wall. He was shooting while driving. He’d have to go slow if he wanted to hit me, at least that’s what I told myself.