ZWD: King of an Empty City (6 page)

              Weekends used to be spent at the farmers’ market, and then one year Andy decided that we should start a garden. He’d read this article about urban homesteading and how you could grow your own food and live off the grid. He wanted to really give it a try. I helped him till the garden. It was a plot of land we rented together. We worked all summer on this and didn’t grow much more than weeds. I enjoyed the work but had no idea what we were really doing. I think we grew a few tomatoes. I wish now I’d paid more attention to the books and pamphlets he’d given me to read, we could really use them.

He’d wanted to install solar panels and sun domes into our roofs. We started with his house and installed a skylight for the bathroom. We really just made a mess and caused a leak in his bathroom. The best project we did was to install a bamboo floor in their kitchen. It actually looked good. We spent a week taking out the old floor and we redid the sub floor, then laid the bamboo flooring down. We joked about starting our own flooring company. We did our house next and again it looked like a professional had done it. We showed our work to another neighbor who was going to remodel his home, and he hired us to do his kitchen. I was very proud of that job. There it was; we had a side business. We were floor guys.

They bought a house in the same neighborhood when Andy’s job got extended. Our houses were two blocks from each other and we walked back and forth all the time. That was how we got to know everyone between us. Walking back and forth, you meet people working in their yards, you stop and talk. You get to know them. In the fall, we held a party at Andy and Jill’s house. Neighbors were invited and under the crisp, cold night sky next to an outdoor fireplace we shared food and drinks. We played horseshoes and darts against the house, and we laughed all night. Andy and Jill made the neighborhood alive and vibrant. People were always laughing and smiling. Without them it would have been a bunch of people closed in their homes, maybe waving at each other occasionally. With them there we became neighbors.

I remember one night everyone was sitting on either the couch or on chairs pointed at the TV, popcorn, blankets, and beer all ready. My girl and Jill had never seen the movie
Army of Darkness
, so Andy and I thought they must see this film. We invited Steven and Katie from down the street and Bob all over to watch it with us. We were having our own Bad Movie Night double feature. The first film was
Manos: The Hands of Fate
. Bob had never seen that one and he laughed so hard through most of it that he could hardly drink his beer. I think we had more fun laughing at Bob than we did at the movie. The film was only an hour and a half long, but we kept stopping it and replaying bits so almost two hours later, we had popcorn and beer spilled all over the floor and the girls were ready for
Army of Darkness
. All three of them sat there with their faces hidden for the first part of the film, but as it went along their faces came out from under the blankets and from behind pillow forts and they started laughing again.

Bob thanked us for a great night as he left after the movies. Steve and Katie helped us clean up, then got back to their house and the kids. Andy and Jill sat with us on the back porch drinking beer by candlelight. I couldn’t believe how the girls kept trying to put logic to that movie. For days afterward, my girl kept asking me questions about the film. “How was he able to keep the chainsaw running without his finger on the trigger?” “How come the book could fly?” “Was the car out of gas?” The questions went on and on for probably a week. I thought I had her hooked on scary movies after that, but I couldn’t get her to watch any more. I couldn’t help making fun of her building a pillow fort on the couch and hiding her eyes behind her hands, as she lay curled up on the couch next to me under a blanket that night. Oh, that was a great night. That was normal.

              When we came back from the camp at the Big Dam Bridge we found out Andy was dead. Jill was missing. Most of our neighbors were either killed by marauders or zombies. The barricades we’d erected did little good in keeping any of us safe. Like at the Big Dam Bridge, a couple of sawhorses, really, were not that effective.
 

              We searched Andy and Jill’s house, trying to find some trace of where she’d been. There was nothing giving us a clue about anything. Bob Lester was one of our friends, he lived two doors down from us. He was still in his house. He was the one who gave us the news about Andy. Andy was bitten when the first wave of zombies came into the neighborhood. He was trying to break up a fight he thought was between two people, but one was a zombie. It turned and bit him. He wandered home and attacked Jill. Bob didn’t know what happened to Steve and Kate. He said he killed her one afternoon when he ran into her sneaking into the Safeway for food.  

He wasn’t staying in town. Bob decided he was going to try to make it out of town. He thought if he could get to old Highway 25 on the other side of Conway, he was sure he could make it to Heber Springs, where he had family and a place on the lake where he could wait it all out. He was an old vet who had served at the end of Vietnam. He enjoyed the camping and solitude Heber Springs offered and spent many of his weekends there, so he was never really around us when we had the neighborhood parties. But during the week he was always around because he was retired. He was our neighborhood watch guy who knew everything going on. He told us who was left and where they were, and how a few didn’t answer their doors anymore. He said the hell with it and decided to go to Heber when he was delivering food and he’d found to Mrs. Wilson and was shot at through the window.

               There were one or two people left in the neighborhood and they weren’t as friendly as Bob was. Like us they were scared. Unlike us, they weren’t seeking strength in numbers. It was hard to get people to come out of their homes. This was when we learned the rule of noise. DON’T MAKE ANY! We saw Bob off and then we went down the middle of the street yelling for people to come out of their homes. Nobody did, but zombies came out of the woodwork. We were on the run in no time. Sleeping wherever we could find a safe place like a PT Cruiser, breaking into houses looking for food.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 07

ZWD: Dec. 08.

Topographical maps, survival books, gardening, and not one book on plant recognition. We may starve before the zombies get us. Time to go.

Inside the library, the doors to the bathroom were these two-inch-thick hardwood doors with big deadbolt locks on them, thick and strong. We’d been in this building for days, and even though I knew it was empty I still went to the bathroom with a weapon in my hands. When I opened the door I was ready to swing the shovel at anything on the other side. I knew we were safe. I knew the noises I could barely hear out there were her bumping around, but I just couldn’t get comfortable.

             
For the last two days I’d been looking for a book on plant recognition. It was my goal to be able to spot a potato plant and say, “We should dig here!” I hadn’t found that book yet. Taking a break, I found her on the fourth floor poring over maps of the city. Topographic and road maps, photos of the city from what looked like a satellite, I guess that’s what people used before Google Maps. Now we’re back to these things again.

She had a magic marker in her hand and was marking places on the map. Nearby was a notepad where she’d written Roosevelt and I-630. On the map she had a piece of paper stretched along Roosevelt covering everything south of it. It was the same for the north side of I-630.

“What’cha doing, girl?”

“Trying to come up with a reasonable territory.”

She’d reckoned that we needed a boundary, a place to call our territory where we’d hunt, garden, and live. I liked the idea of it going from I-630 to Roosevelt; it would be fifteen blocks long or better. I suggested that the western border be Chester Street. It included Philander Smith College and some vacant lots. I don’t know why I thought we should include that place, but I felt it would be important later. She had no problem with that; it was the eastern boundaries she was concerned with. For her, the logical choice would be Main Street, but that would mean that we were going to be living outside of the territory she chose. Just on the other side of the street, but still outside. Scott Street, which ran right behind the Safeway where we were moving our base to, put that boundary to our backs. But it did run from Roosevelt to the interstate. No other street did east of us. So it was settled, we would claim everything between Roosevelt to the south and I-630 to the north, Scott to the east and Chester to the west. All lands within that area would be our territory, as declared by the swift outlining of a magic marker over the map we’d defined as our kingdom. I was king of an empty city. Now what?

              Never having been a king before, I thought I should do my royal duty, so I went down to the first floor and gave the card catalogue one more crack. I could never figure those things out. I laughed at myself because I still did what I was taught in grade school and wrote down the location of the books on a scrap of paper with the little pencil that was provided and was never sharp. Why I didn’t just take the card with me I don’t know, but I put it back the way I’d done all the others these last few days and went in search of a book. Twenty minutes later I still couldn’t find it, but I kept pulling out other books that caught my interest.

              You ever have one of those “aha” moments when you realize you were using the wrong word in the right context? I’d been looking for plant recognition. I pulled out a book as I browsed and saw a book called
Edible Wild Plants Identification Guide
. Recognition, Identification. The right word will take you in a whole new direction. Back at the card catalogue, I suddenly found all sorts of books on this subject. It’s good to be the king.

              I spent the rest of the morning reading plant
identification
books. Most of them didn’t make a lot of sense to me, I think mainly because I had no reference point. So, I got a lot of stuff like this: “
The leaves of the potato plant are dark green in color. The oval-shaped leaves are compound, which means each leaf is comprised of multiple leaf-like parts.” Helps out a lot, don’t it, and no picture. But I read anyway. Who knows? Something might come in handy later.

             
I was sitting on the floor leaning against the front door reading my potato books. Thunder rumbled outside and mist hung thick in the air. My girl came down the stairs and stopped short, letting out a barely audible “no.” Behind me, outside past the atrium, stood six zombies—all of them staring down at me. There were eight or ten feet separating us, along with two sets of locked glass doors. I couldn’t believe I’d been that stupid. I’d gotten too comfortable here and let my guard down. She just sat down on the steps and stared, her hand over her mouth.

             
I eased away from the door and one of them that had his head pressed against the glass started pounding on it with his fist. There was no force behind his blows, but it still made me uneasy. What worried me more was that these six would draw more to the door because they knew food was inside. The last thing we needed was to be trapped. I wasn’t too worried about being trapped because there were plenty of exits around the building. We could slip out of one on the far side if we had to, but still there was that possibility of being trapped and I didn’t like it.

She walked over to where I now stood at the base of the ramp leading up to the help desk. “If they get through the outside doors we’ll run upstairs and grab our gear, then go out a fire door and slip out the side,” I said. She walked up to the door and stared at them for a long time, not moving. They stared back, some licking the glass with black tongues, others making feeble attempts to break into the building. All of their dead eyes were glued to her. She moved to the side of the doors and all heads turned to her. She moved to the other side and they all followed her over there. She did this several times and turned to me.

“It’s like those Jesus paintings where his eyes follow you around the room,” she said.

“Let’s get out of sight before they attract more.” I turned and started up the stairs. At the top, I looked back and she was still standing there looking at them. “Come on,” I urged. She turned to go and as she walked away they started beating on the door more. The further away she got the more frantic the pounding became. Another zombie joined them out of the fog. She ran up the ramp and joined me. I could almost hear them saying, “Food, don’t go.” We continued up stairs to the second floor and I asked what we had to eat.

“Nothing,” she replied. “Our food has run out just like theirs.”              
  

              “What about the power bars?”

              “Gone, we ate them like candy.”

              “We got nothing?”

              “Nada.”

              Just like with them, our food had run out and we had to go find some (just like them). Unlike them, we knew where some was if scavengers hadn’t found it.

              “When do you want to leave?”

              “As soon as we can. I don’t want to be out after dark. Especially in this fog.” We went up to the second level where we’d been sleeping in the study cubicle and had for the most part made our home. It took ten minutes to gather our things and get ready to leave. We had no food, so we were lighter leaving than we were going in. We were leaving with only four notebooks and some loose pages for our plans. Overall, I think that worked well with the idea of traveling light
.
My pack’s weight was about thirty pounds, mostly weapons. Hers was maybe twenty. I only mention this because all the survival books say travel as light as possible.