Black Tide Rising - eARC (5 page)

* * *

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired in my life,” said Sam. She was perched on a stack of goods with her elbows on her knees and her head handing down.

Next to her, Rochelle Lewis was trying to bring her breathing under control. “Me, neither,” she said, almost gasping.

But as exhausted as she was, Rochelle’s spirits were higher than they’d been in days. No,
weeks
—maybe even months or years. After her divorce three years earlier, she’d buried herself in her job as manager of the diner. That had kept her busy, but she realized now that she’d done it at the expense of being very lonely. And then the zombie apocalypse—she still thought that was a ridiculous name because, first, the people infected by the virus weren’t actually undead even if they were monsters, and second, she’d studied the Bible and knew damn well this wasn’t really the apocalypse, just a man-made catastrophe—had come along and left her completely alone. She’d thought she’d die in the bowels of that restaurant within a day or two—or, worse, get turned into a naked mindless shrieking monster herself.

Now, she had a purpose again—and people to share it with. Impulsively, she put her arm around Sam’s shoulders and hugged her. “I’m really glad you’re here, sweetie.”

Sam’s arm slid around her waist. “Me too, boss.”
Boss
carried a weight of affection in it that was not usually found in that particular term.

Down on the ground below, they could see Tom Kaminski trying to maneuver his wheelchair. The old man’s expression was a cross between determined ferocity and exasperation. He had his rifle perched on his lap and was simultaneously trying to keep it from sliding off while he patrolled the area looking for any signs of approaching zombies. He was at least one hand short of what he needed.

It was kind of funny, actually. Both Rochelle and Sam started chuckling.

“I’d better go down and help him,” Sam said. She rose and headed for the stairs.

“A guardian angel for a guardian angel,” Rochelle murmured to herself. “Hell, who knows? Maybe this
is
the apocalypse and St. John just got some of the details wrong.”

* * *

They’d gotten about half of their goods along with all the pallets up onto the roof when Freddy Rodriguez arrived with his industrial van full of more stuff to haul up—including fifty cases of paper each of which seemed to weigh a ton. They didn’t have the equipment to bring up a lot of cases at a time using the hoist, so most of the paper had to be hauled up by hand. Fortunately, Freddy was a big man and the three teenagers he brought with him were all fresh and rested.

The general unspoken consensus among the old folks was:
let them finish the job.

“Yeah, take a rest,” said Freddy. “But not until you get all those pallets into position. And see if you can glue them down. We’ll have to attach the tent stakes to the pallets instead of welding them to the roof, so we don’t want them sliding around.”

“What sort of glue should we use?” asked his wife Victoria.

“I got no idea, honey. Try all of them and see what works best. But before you do, see if you can scrape the paint off the roof using the chisels and files we got. Glue will bond better to naked steel than it will to paint, especially if it’s roughed up a little.”

The look Victoria gave him was not exactly full of spousal fondness. “I thought we were getting a break?” she said. But she didn’t complain any further before setting to the work. Jerry and Latoya Haywood joined her, along with their daughter Jayden. So did Andy, after she got a little more rest.

Since there was no way to find out which sort of glue would work best before they had to start piling stuff onto the pallets, they just made sure to use every kind they had on every pallet. Gorilla glue, epoxy glue, super glue, Elmer’s glue, Loc-tite—if they had it, they used it. Fortunately, Tom Kaminski had been adamant on the need to bring lots of glue even though their original plan had been to camp out in the woods. “Nothing’s handier than glue except duct tape,” he’d insisted, “and you never know when and how you might need it.”

The old fart turned out to be right. He had a habit of doing that, which Andy had found annoying for decades. Forty-eight years, eight months and two days, to be exact, if you counted from their wedding. Longer than that, if you counted from their first date—when he’d claimed he knew a better Italian restaurant than the one she proposed and…hadn’t been wrong.

By the time they got all the pallets in position and glued down, Freddy and the youngsters had gotten everything in the vans and trucks onto the roof.

“The rubber mats next and then the plastic floor mats for whatever the rubber won’t cover,” Freddy ordered. “They all need to be glued down too, because we don’t want any metal—not even nails or staples—connecting us to the roof, and the pallets are already full of nails.”

A shout came from below. “I need to get up there!”

Freddy took a deep breath and ran fingers through his hair. “Okay, I guess it’s time to haul up the gorilla.”

“Don’t call my husband a gorilla,” said Andy. “He’s not
that
damn big and he’s mostly bald now. Who ever saw a bald gorilla?”

“He’s big enough to break my poor back,” muttered Freddy. But he was already going down the stairs.

It took them a while to get Tom Kaminski up onto the roof. They didn’t want to take the risk of using the hoist since they had no suitable rigging. Even as strong as he was, Tom was seventy now, so he needed to take a lot of breaks. Sam tried to help at first, but she was too small to make much of a difference and just got in Freddy’s way. In the end, she got assigned to bring up the wheelchair, the rifle, and the custom-made shooting bench that Tom had had designed for him after he recovered from the accident that took his legs.

But, finally, it was done. And Tom didn’t take more than a ten minute rest before he started patrolling again—and this time he had a nice flat steel surface to roll around on, along with a helper.

“Come on, Sam,” he said. “You can be my spotter and set up the bench whenever we need it.”

“Only if you teach me how to shoot the rifle.”

“It’s a deal. But you got to carry the rifle too.”

“What am I, a caddie?”

“Hell, no. Caddies get paid.”

* * *

By sundown, what everyone was starting to call “tent city” had been erected and most of their goods stashed away somewhere. The two vinyl tool sheds were positioned in the center of the roof. By mutual agreement, one of them would be inhabited by Tom and Andy Kaminski and the other by Pedro Vargas and his eighty-one year old mother Yarelis, but they’d both serve as emergency shelters for everyone in case of a thunderstorm.

Surrounding the sheds were all the tents. Those ranged in size from a couple of eight by twelve foot dome-shaped tents that would hold all four of the Haywoods and Freddy and Victoria and their two kids, to a couple of eight by six tents—one for Luis and Flora Rodriguez and one that had been intended for Jack but got turned over to Rochelle Lewis, Sam Crane and Ceyonne Bennett.

Jack would have to settle for a two-person tent. They’d brought several of those, figuring they could use them to hold supplies. Assuming that Ceyonne’s father eventually showed up, he could have one of them also.

The two generators were positioned in the hut they’d constructed with the cases of paper. The roof for the hut was made out of metal shelving Freddy had found in the Office Depot with more cases stacked on top of them. They used the hollow steel tubes that were originally intended to provide the frame for the shelving as a lightning rod that Freddy welded onto the staircase.

There hadn’t been time to cut off the lower part of the staircase before it got dark, so they’d put that off until the next day. Someone would have to stand watch at the top of the stairs all through the night. Ceyonne volunteered for the first shift, from sundown until midnight. Freddie would take the next four hours and then he’d wake up Jerry Haywood for the last stretch.

Eventually, once the lower staircase was removed, Andy figured they could rely on the teenagers to be lookouts at night. But that brought up another problem—which, happily, she’d already foreseen.

“You know what’s going to happen soon enough,” Latoya said to her, “we let teenagers stay up at night without supervision. It ain’t just gonna be my son and Ceyonne, neither.”

Andy chuckled. “No shit. My fifteen-year-old grandson—he’ll be sixteen next month—is already eyeing both your daughter and Sam and you give it another month and he’ll be panting after Lucinda Rodriguez too.”

“Jayden’s a good girl,” Latoya said, a little stiffly.

“They’re
all
good girls. So was I and so were you, at that age—and I don’t know about you but I got my cherry popped when I was sixteen.”

Latoya sniffed. “I was older. Seventeen.”

“Right. There’s not going to be much to do up here and when winter comes along in a few months there’ll be even less to keep them busy.”

They were standing near the edge of the roof—not right next it, though, since there was no railing—looking at the sun go down. Andy gestured with her head toward the tent she and Tom were sharing. “I got a big box in there full of rubbers. I cleaned out the whole condom section in Walgreen’s.” She cawed like a crow. “You should’ve seen the look I got from the cashier. She might as well have said out loud,
what kinda old slut needs any rubbers at all, much less hundreds of ’em
?’”

Latoya was by nature and upbringing a lot more straight-laced than Andy Kaminski, but she couldn’t help bursting into laughter. After the laughter passed, she admitted quietly, “I bought some too, for Eddie. Me and Jerry don’t need to worry about it because he got fixed after we had Jayden. ‘Two kids is enough,’ he said.” Her expression got a little stiff again. “And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Ceyonne’s already making him use rubbers, whether he likes it or not. That girl’s…not exactly your best Christian.”

Andy didn’t say anything in response. She and Tom had both lapsed from Catholicism long ago, and she had her own opinion as to what constituted “proper Christian behavior.”

Whether or not Ceyonne Bennett was the world’s finest Christian young lady, Andy was glad she was with them. By now, they’d all heard about the shootings Ceyonne had done earlier that day.

And now, another shot rang out from behind them. Andy recognized the sound, having heard it before. That was no pistol firing. That was Tom’s deer rifle, a Remington 700 .30-06.

Turning around, they saw Tom Kaminski near the opposite edge of the tank roof. He had his shooting bench in position and was taking aim at something in the distance past the fence surrounding the tank farm.

“You got ’im, Tom!” said Sam excitedly. She was bracing his wheelchair from behind and peering through a set of binoculars that Tom kept in a bag attached to it. “He’s down. And now the other one’s—”

Tom fired again. The recoil jarred him back a little, but between his own size and the wheelchair being both locked and braced by the girl with him, he wasn’t thrown out of position. He worked the bolt and jacked another round into the chamber.

“Call it, Sam,” he commanded. “Like I explained.”

“That one’s down too. The third one’s still off a ways. I’d say two hundred and fifty yards, thereabouts, but it—well, she—is coming toward the fence. Uh…ten o’clock. Well, maybe nine thirty.”

“I see her. Wheel me around a bit.” As Sam did so, Tom raised the bench with one hand while he kept the rifle high in the other. Within three seconds, he was back in position.

He didn’t spend more than another three seconds aiming, and then—

“She’s down, too!” Sam exclaimed. “Boy, you shoot good, Tom.”

Andy’s husband didn’t say anything in response to the praise, but she knew what that expression on his face meant. She’d spent most of her life with the old fart and knew him better than she knew anyone, including maybe even herself.

After ten years of depression—no, more than eleven years now, since the accident—Tom Kaminski had found his life again.

A guardian angel in a wheelchair. Well, why not? Andy wasn’t as familiar with the Bible as either Rochelle Lewis or Latoya Haywood, but she knew this apocalypse was a bastard version of the one in the Book of Revelations. You couldn’t hardly expect archangels with flaming swords to show up for this sort of low-class brawl, after all.

3

Andy had been a little worried that Tom’s shooting of the three zombies on the perimeter of the tank farm might have drawn attention to them. But the next morning, when she studied the scene of the killing through the binoculars, she saw that her fears had been groundless.

“I told you,” said her husband. He nodded toward the knot of zombies in the distance who were still feeding on the corpses of the three zombies he’d shot the evening before. “That’s somewhere between two hundred and fifty and three hundred yards from here. Even if they were still real people with brains, they wouldn’t have been able to tell where the shots came from.”

With the free hand that wasn’t holding the rifle on his lap, he made a little circling motion. “We’re in flat land, up high, with nothing to focus the sound. At that distance, the sound of the shot would have seemed to be coming from everywhere or nowhere, however you want to look at it.”

He lowered the hand and shrugged. “Zombies? They wouldn’t have even thought about it. A mysterious noise coming from somewhere—anywhere—in the distance? Could have been anything, if they had enough brains to think about it. But they don’t.”

“Okay,” she said. “But I think you ought to avoid shooting any zombies except ones trying to climb over the fence.”

“I haven’t seen a single one try to do that,” he said. “Why would they, unless they thought there was something on the other side they wanted? The chain link fence that surrounds the tank farm is at least six feet high and it’s got three strands of barbed wire on top of that. Any naked-ass zombie tries to climb over it’s going to get pretty badly cut—and the minute they start bleeding, you know other zombies are going to go after them.”

“Yeah, but that’s my biggest worry, Tom. From what I’ve seen on the TV, once zombies go into a feeding frenzy it gets out of control. Their own noise and the mayhem they’re causing attracts other zombies and before you know it they’re starting to swarm all over.” She pointed at the distant fence. “Enough zombies pile against up against that and it’ll go down, barbed wire or no barbed wire. And then we’ve got zombies swarming into the tank farm. Maybe we can hold them off, as high up as we are on these steel tanks. But then we’ll be surrounded by rotting bodies—dozens of ’em, maybe hundreds. D’you really want that?”