Hunger Driven: A Zombie Short Story (3 page)

Back on the job, I took advantage of the breaks in the approaching horde to cut down stragglers at the edges of the pile below me, and carefully peeled back more and more of the zombies.  By catching them in the middle of taking one of their shuffling steps, I usually managed to get the now fully dead corpse to tumble back, instead or forward.  This helped reduce the overall total in a pile and kept the hissing creatures from reaching critical mass, or more importantly, critical height.

Focusing on the area right around the base of the pile, I dropped over a hundred zombies in the next five minutes and created another, final windrow of bodies nearly three feet high in a semi-circle.  This barrier would only grow as I continued emptying magazines at a slower but still steady pace.

The spring sunshine held steady for me and I killed zombies until about six in the afternoon before punching out on the time clock and going off duty.  This amounted to turning off the boombox stereo and changing out the batteries.  I shuffled through the CDs and loaded a few new discs into the loading tray.  If I had to listen to music blaring at me all day, I was going to pick my own soundtrack for the apocalypse.  No elevator tunes and no Kanye.  Otherwise, I had pretty wide open tastes.

Then, I picked up a rifle and paced off one more circuit of the roof’s edge for an assessment.  Using my binoculars, I scanned the distance in all directions. 

I saw no recent signs of survivors.  Some of the buildings sported makeshift banners calling for help, but all looked ragged and timeworn.  The paint or ink was faded and I I tried not to think about how those people ended up dying.  Was it from dehydration, malnutrition or simply being overrun by the relentless dead? 

On the good side, I managed to survive to quitting time for another day and I estimated the total taken down today to be at least 2,500.  That was about the numbers tallied from the first day in Woodville, but instead of finishing up tomorrow, I estimated I still had at least two more days of killing to go.  This horde had to number at least five thousand, maybe as many as seven thousand. 

Based on our experiences in other towns, someone on the Colonel’s staff calculated I could expect see about half of the town’s population reanimated and roaming around outside.  Not everybody reanimated, and not all zombies could manage to reach the streets.  When I went scavenging, I still found many of the hungry dead tied up or otherwise retrained by family members.  This was especially true in those chaotic early days, where false hope spread amongst the population regarding a cure.  If a cure was ever found, for either the animated dead or the bitten, I never saw it.

So, even with an estimated quarter of the world’s population going zed at about the same time, humanity might still have had a chance if the politicians hadn’t fed us that line of shit about a possible cure being in the works.  There was no vaccine for this disease, and once you got it you were done.  But, we waited too long to accept the truth staring at us with hazy gray eyes that seemed to radiate hunger.  

Shivering at my own overly dramatic internal dialogue, I looked back around me in the here-and-now.  Well, I had the food and the ammo.  What else was I going to do, anyway?  Shrugging at my own silly question, I sat down and started loading magazines until it was too dark to see.  Only then did I feel like getting something to eat and settling down for bed.

CHAPTER TWO

I got right to work the next morning at 8 a.m. with a thinning operation intended to build up the piles further out from the building.  Without the music going last night, the zombies tended to stop moving.  Not so much freezing in place as assuming a holding pattern.  They might move around in a random manner but generally staying within a few hundred feet of where they last perceived some stimulating event. 

This lack of perception, and their rapidly evaporating attention span, was one of our best defenses against the dead.  Once we removed ourselves from their senses, they almost immediately lost interest in us as a meal.  Only when we concentrated up in groups did their attention seem to linger, but I suspected this was because humans as a group were incapable of actually doing anything quietly.

Because of the dense concentration of the dead in front of the store, I decided to try a little experiment and dug out some of my homemade firecrackers.  Using long fuses and my trusty slingshot, I lofted a half dozen fake M80s far out into the parking lot. 

One of the small black powder bombs going off sounds like a 30-06 rifle being fired, so six exploding in rapid succession stirred up the dead horde as they tramped into the center of the kill zone.  I focused on hitting the ones leaving the front of the store and laid down a new carpet of really dead corpses that humped up on the piles.

I worked hard for over an hour, dropping target after target and keeping a wary eye out for any groups bunching up or converging.  Even within a horde this size, smaller subunits could become tightly packed and almost merge into a single huge organism.  In Houston, I’d witnessed what happened if a thousand zombies were to press on the brick wall or glass front of a building.  They could collapse the structure and kill anyone trapped inside, or on top, as the case may be. 

In addition to my own vestigial sense of self preservation, Colonel Northcutt wanted as many of the buildings in town preserved.  He would eventually dispatch work crews to erect a wall around the best preserved portion of the town and allow, or encourage, settlers to relocate.  He’d done it successfully three times already, and Jasper would be one of the biggest settlements yet.

Plus, Jasper would be a gold mine of supplies the Guard and civilians desperately needed.  With a total population in the four enclaves approaching ten thousand, food became an ongoing issue.  Gardens were already going in everywhere and the few greenhouses had provided at least some fresh produce over the long winter.  Still the bulk of the crops would not be ready for several months yet, so for now we salvaged.

In addition to food, ammunition remained a highly sought after item, both as a medium of trade and for the more practical use of downing zombies.  In a very real sense, ammunition was more valuable than just about any other commodity.  The new paradigm for survival was three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without air, and three seconds without bullets.

Fortunately for me, the military still used the .223 or 5.56x45 rounds for their primary weapons.  This was more due to the availability of the military style rifles and the accompanying magazines than anything else.  Hundreds of millions of 5.56 rounds were no doubt used up in those first few desperate days and weeks of the outbreak as the military and police tried to get a foothold against the rising tide of the dead.  I didn’t know much about those first few desperate weeks as I was fighting my own battles at the time.  My own failures merely reflected the overall losses incurred by the military, or so I gathered.

The ragtag conglomeration of Texas Army National Guard units comprising Colonel William Northcutt’s command still had enough ammunition to fight several major battles, but not much more after that.  Given the tattered and makeshift supply and logistics structure of the military, I doubted the local command counted on getting much support in the future.  The Colonel was desperate for more ammo for his M4 and M16 rifles, And that was one of the reasons he let me go about my business. 

At an average of 1.1 to 1.2 shots per kill, I could take out a respectable number of zombies without forcing the Colonel to dip into his own military stores.  Also, by sitting still and bringing the zombies to me, I saved on fuel and transportation wear and tear.  Allowing me nearly free rein to salvage in the towns I helped liberate seemed like a small price to pay.  Especially since I usually ended up donating back most of what I took anyway.  Other than keeping up my little homestead, what else did I need extras for?

I did request an accounting for my donations, so I would get a tax deduction I in the future.  That was just the accountant in me, but Colonel Northcutt agreed and I think he almost smiled at the idea.

I continued to kill zombies throughout the rest of the day and soon fell into a rhythm where I could function mechanically while my mind teased at bigger picture problems.  Despite a few of the younger officers complaining that I was a mercenary, I felt like what I did contributed to the survival of the human race.  What I did mattered.  If some part of humanity could survive this catastrophe, then I could die knowing my job was done.

Of course, what I wondered about was the endgame.  What was the colonel’s ultimate goal in creating these safe zones?  Did he want to go bigger and try to exterminate all the zombies, or was he merely content to seize as much property as he could and wait for the zombies to naturally decay.  Both options offered advantages but so far the Colonel remained noncommittal.

If he was waiting for Nature to take a hand, I think he was going to be sadly mistaken.  Based on my observations and completely non-scientific study, the decay of the dead seemed to reach a certain point and then just appeared to stop.  The oldest ones, from what we called the First Wave, were still rotting, stinking pusbags but other than the fluids drying out and the skin assuming the texture of dried leather, the eventual breakdown had yet to occur.  If anything, the older ones seemed to get around a little better once they stopped dripping and oozing.  I’d yet to secure one of these for our resident mad scientist, Dr. Gurha Singh.

To this point, I’d only dared share my observations with Dr. Singh, who seemed eager for any field data I could supply.  As one of our few “real” doctors, as in, possessing a medical degree, he was forbidden from straying out from the protection of the main settlement on Lake Livingston.  Colonel Northcutt himself gave the order, one I fully endorsed.  Singh was a nice enough guy but I figured he would last about thirty seconds outside the walls.  Smart as a whip, and with the common sense of a gerbil.  Not a very intimidating ‘mad scientist’ in truth, but he was the only one I had to work with.

This day, when I stopped for lunch, I turned off the boombox to give myself a little peace and quiet.  The constant music did great drawing in the dead but I didn’t care for an all-day concert.  Plus, despite my best efforts, the pile growing at the front of the store continued to build.  The metal shutters still held but the glass panes inside began cracking and then shattering before ten a.m.  I wanted to let the zombies take a coffee break and walk off some of that innate aggression before I started back trimming the horde.  With no additional stimuli, they would lose interest fairly quickly and revert to aimless wandering.

When I finished my heated can of beanie weenies, mmmmm good, I stashed my trash and took a seat next to the tent, trying to find a little shade as I once again went about reloading magazines.  I worked silently, my movements developed over months of practice to avoid making any discernible noise.  Of course, brass clanked together and springs occasionally gave a little ping, but no human sounds.  The zombies would hopefully be dispersed a bit after this break.

Not for the first time I wondered if I could hire someone to just ride along with me to run the reloading gizmos and stuff rounds into the magazines for me.  I tried to get the soldiers who came along to help out with this but strangely, they just wanted to spend their time shooting zombies.  After couple of hours, they really didn’t seem interested in doing much of anything.

Maybe I could post a ‘help wanted’ sign on the bulletin boards.  I could pay a decent wage in salvage goods and having someone along to handle reloading might save not only time but wear and tear on my poor fingers.  I already had impressive calluses on my fingers, and still they bled from time to time.  I reminded me of something I read about musicians who played guitar without using a pick.  ‘Played until their fingers bled’, I think was a line from a song I half recalled.

Yeah, like that could happen.  I hadn’t tried recruiting from the ‘civilian’ ranks yet, but fat chance.  Once most folks got behind the relative safety of the walls, getting any of them to set foot outside required extraordinary effort.  Heck, most of the guardsmen and the militia would have stayed inside if the need was not so great.

Yes, the colonel endorsed a well regulated militia to go along with his National Guard troops, who by now were grizzled old veterans of the ongoing conflict.  Colonel Northcutt could not bring himself to call them a militia, of course, given all the evil connotations such a label spawned, even in Texas.  No, they were the Home Defense Force, which consisted of everyone willing to carry a weapon that hadn’t, for one reason or another, enlisted in the Guard.  Mostly because they were older than dirt or under the age requirement for the Guard, which was 17.  They might be a raggedy looking bunch but they would stand the walls and fight.  Or go out and scavenge if the Colonel asked them. 

Thinking about it, I decided to approach one of the old guys there about working as my assistant.  That sounded better than ‘reloading mule’, anyway.