ZWD: King of an Empty City (22 page)

              “A coalition government?”

              “One person who has power is a king. A person who takes power is a dictator. One person in power is never a good thing for the people under him because greed eventually steps in. Two groups of people in cooperation make a partnership and can achieve a common goal, or they can bitch and fight like an old married couple. Two groups of people working together are a coalition. If we work together we can accomplish great things and everyone is happy. Look at the Founding Fathers, they overthrew a king.”

              “But out of the two groups someone has to take the lead. If we form a coalition government, will you take the lead?”

              “Like a president?”

              “Yeah.”

And with that, I abdicated my throne as the king of an empty city and put our future in the hands of a fourteen-year-old boy who hadn’t even started shaving yet. I’d have to teach him how to do it since he didn’t know how, and until he was ready I’d became the president of Misfit Island. We shook hands and I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, but at least I now had allies. I immediately thought of Shaun and Andrew and grandpa holed up in their house and Ashley and all those we hadn’t met yet and how they’d feel about my plans of grooming this kid to be the next president of our new government. It’s a poetic thing to say, but another thing entirely when “a child shall lead them” is the truth. From my dream John’s words rang in my head:
“He’s too naive, you’re going to have to spell it out for him.”
I thought in the dream they were talking about me. I wished I could remember more of it.  

They’d invited us to spend the night in the church with them and I wanted to take them up on the offer just for the warmth of the building. They didn’t have any heat on in there, but with all the bodies massed in one room it was a warm place. But I was vetoed on that; she said she wanted to sleep in her own bed tonight. I thought we were going to go back to the tent, but she wanted to go to the base house, so we trekked off to there. That night we slept in a comfortable bed with a ton of quilts over us as the breeze blew in through the broken window. As she readied for bed in the bathroom, I explained what Eddie and I had decided to do for a government. She just nodded or said “humm” in response.

“Donny asked me to teach the kids to fight,” she said as she crawled into bed.

              “What did you tell him?”

              “I told him that I didn’t know the first thing about military tactics,” she said, settling in against me under the covers. “He said he thought I knew more than you did.”

              I was shocked at Donny’s accusation. I’d read all those damned books at the library about tactics and defenses. I’d fortified our roof.

“Not so much a better tactician. He thinks I’m a better fighter than you are.” Her argument had me there; she was a better fighter than I was. I was just stuck being interim president. In moments, she was sleeping beside me as I finished up this entry. I wish that Dylan and Stager were around for real so I could bounce my ideas off them. It’s lonely at the top, especially when there are so few of you around.
 

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 23

ZWD: Dec. 19.

My first official act as interim president was to pee. Right after my cabinet meeting with a nine-year-old about his algebra homework. Why, just yesterday I was king.

             
I woke up in an empty bed hugging a pillow. At first, I just thought she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom because I heard movement in the room, so I rolled over on my side and dozed back off to sleep. Then I heard paper shuffling and a sound I couldn’t identify.

When I opened my eyes there on the floor sat Jr. with a book and a legal pad across his lap. He was holding down the legal pad with his right hand like it was going to run away and with this left hand he was frantically erasing most of the page.

                  “What are you doing, Jr.?” I asked through my pillow.

              “Algebra,” he said as he kept erasing. It was going to be one of those conversations, first thing in the morning to boot.

              “Jr., why are you doing algebra in my bedroom?” I prodded on.

              “I was waiting for you to get up, so I was doing my homework.”

              “You have homework?”

              “Yep, Mrs. Greenbaum is pretty strict about the homework.”

              “Who’s Mrs. Greenbaum again?”

              “Mrs. Greenbaum is our teacher. We bring her into the church once a week to teach us. Donny takes a squad and goes and gets her.”

              “So you guys have school?”

              “Oh yes, Bobby insisted.”

“Good for her. Now back to my original question. What are you doing here in my bedroom, Jr., besides waiting for me to wake up?”

              “Welp, the Commander sent me over here to get you, but with strict orders to let you sleep. So, while you were sleeping, I was getting in my homework.”

              “Very noble of you, sticking with the homework. Who’s the Commander?”

              “Your wife.”

              “Oh, I didn’t know she was the Commander.”

              “We had to give her some rank. Donny’s the general, so what’s above that? Commander.”

              “You're right. It all makes perfect sense now that I’m confused and awake,” I said as I sat up.

              “So are you really the intern president now?” Jr. asked as I went to the bathroom.

              “You mean interim president? I guess so.”  And thus, my first official meeting as interim president was with a nine-year-old about homework, and my first official act as interim president was to pee.

              “What do you know about simplification?” he asked.

              “I know a little, what’s up?”

“What do you do when you can’t reduce numbers down to nothing else in a fraction?” I walked over to where he sat on the floor and looked at the problem.

“Add those two together,” I said, pointing. He smacked his forehead as if he suddenly remembered.

“That’s right, that’s right,” he muttered as I reached for my jeans. Outside, thunder rumbled in the distance as I smelled the sweater I was going to wear today.

              “Is it raining again?”

              “Snowing when I came in,” he said, his head bent over the problem on his papers.

              “So, where’s the commander?”

              “She’s with Donny over at that house with all the zombies around it. She sent me over to get you,“ he said, looking up from his papers. “Are you the interim president or the sheriff? Cause she said I should come over here and get the sheriff, but to let you sleep because you deserved it.”

“I guess I’m both,” I said, pulling on my shoes. “Where’s your family, Jr.?” It was a question I regretted asking as soon as the words left my mouth.

This efficient kid who was doing homework during a zombie crisis for a moment slumped over and said, “I-630.” He didn’t have to offer more information.

              “So tell me why is my wife the Commander at the house with all the zombies around it?”

              “The zombies are doing weird things over there,” he offered. “So when Donny saw it he sent me to get her and she sent me to get you.”

              “How many times have you been in this house?”

              “Twice, today.”

              “You’ve been in here more?”

              “Yep. You almost caught me one day. But I’m fast like the Flash.”

              “You eat yet, Flash?”

              “Yep.”

              “Well, I haven’t. Meet me downstairs.” Jr. gathered his stuff and went downstairs. I couldn’t very well chastise him for breaking into the house several times on us. Today, it was kind of a necessary skill to have.

Getting the cars in place accelerated my to-do list considerably, and as Jr. pointed out I was interim president, which added a host of other priorities to my to-do list. I had to think about it for a moment. I sat there on the edge of the bed going over the list, trying to decide where to go to next when more thunder rumbled outside. As a survivor, food was priority one; as president safety was priority one. The to-do list became overwhelming to think about, but then one word popped into my head: “delegate.” I’d have to learn to delegate these projects to people and simply oversee them, or I’d kill myself trying to get everything done. As it was now, just thinking about everything I needed to do made my chest tight and I was starting to hyperventilate.

              At the kitchen table, Jr. was working on another problem while I searched for something to eat. I found a package of beef jerky and canned pears. While I spooned them into a bowl I looked at his new problem.

                  “You can’t do that because that number is prime,” I said. He nodded his head and corrected his mistake, then looked at me. His thin lips and bowl haircut reminded me of Alfalfa, but without the freckles.

              “Are we going to make it?” he asked.

              “You're damned right we will.”

             
Outside, there was a thin mist and large flakes of snow were peppering down, covering the already frozen ground. Before going to the house, we went to the tent on top of the Safeway.

             
At the back of the building where the ladder was we climbed the stairs that led to the ladder. On the platform, I pulled the key fob out of my pocket and pointed to the gargoyle with the glowing red eyes that indicated that the building’s electrical power was still coursing through the ladder. If anyone touched it, they were going to get electrocuted to death. A quick click of the button and the gargoyle’s eyes dimmed to darkness.

“Never touch that ladder if the eyes are glowing red,” I told Jr. as we started to climb the ladder.

              “Why?” he asked.

              “Because I want you to live.”

              “What if I climbed it with rubber boots and rubber gloves? You know, insulated?”

His question disturbed me a little because I’d never thought of anyone climbing it while insulated before. Given that it was winter, there was a chance someone could climb it in insulated clothing. I needed to come up with a second line of defense. At the top of the ladder, I turned to Jr. and asked, “Do you really want to take the chance of getting electrocuted, knowing that ladder has a gazillion volts running through it?”

              “No.”

              “Then don’t climb the ladder when the eyes are glowing.”

Jr. looked around the rooftop at our home with a scrunched-up face. You could tell he didn’t like the accommodations. “You really live up here?”

Mimicking his flat monosyllabic response to my earlier questions, I gave him a flat, “Yep.” He didn’t catch my joke. From the heavy rain and wind, the tent had a few stakes that had become loose and I took a moment to re-secure the corners. Other than that, the tent was in pretty good condition. Inside, we went to the gun bag and I pulled out one of the two sniper rifles we’d gotten from the Page family’s gun safe. They had two, one was a Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle, and the other was a Barrett M82 sniper rifle. Thanks to Dylan and Stager I knew a little something about these rifles. The M107 had a much greater range than the M82, and with its scope it had a very long and accurate kill zone. Great for rooftops. The M82 had a shorter barrel, but not by much, and it was lighter, but not by much. It also had a shorter range, but not by much. Its greatest advantage was that it was designed for hit-and-run sniping. You didn’t need to have a stand that spread out several feet to steady your shot. The shooter could shoot and run to another location with minimal trouble from the gun. I pulled out the M82 and did a quick operational check, then attached its scope and loaded it and stuffed more rounds into my pocket. Alone, I could, from a well-selected place, hold off a small army for a day just like Simo Häyhä.

             
Simo was a Finnish patriot who, when the Russians invaded his country in 1939, using only a Mosin-Nagant M28/30 rifle and a 9mm submachine gun, managed to kill seven hundred Russian Red Army soldiers in one hundred days. There are five hundred and five confirmed kills to his name without the machine gun. He was so dangerous that he became Russia’s public enemy number one. Because of him, the Red Army only captured 22,000 square miles of Finland before leaving. He credited his success to well-chosen hiding places and camouflage. My enemy was zombies and they weren’t as dangerous as the Red Army, but my M82 had a silencer, and if what Jr. said was true, that there were over thirty zombies at the alarm house, then we could either take all day to kill them in hand-to-hand combat, or one person could do a little target practice from a safe place and take them out. Personally, I was getting tired of zombies.             

             
When Jr. first saw all the guns in the gun bags, he let out a low “wow.” When he saw me pull out the M82, that “wow” was almost a whisper. I couldn’t help but smile and pretend that I was a G.I. Joe expert in weapons in front of him. I did know guns, but nothing too far beyond the normal range of a gun enthusiast, which I was. I slid the M82 into a neoprene soft case and we headed back down the ladder.

              “Can I shoot it?” he asked a block later.

              “We’ll see.” The snow was coming down in big flakes and making each footstep sound a little louder as the snow built up. This was going to make traveling difficult soon. The loud crunching of snow under your feet meant that you had to stay out of sight longer and move in bursts, or you had to move with the speed of a turtle crossing an alligator-infested road. Nothing could see you moving too fast. It had been years ago when I used to practice moving like that in the Colorado mountains hunting in the winter. I don’t know that I could do it now. I was getting tired of winter too.

             
We were on Nineteenth Street headed towards Louisiana, where we’d cut over to Twentieth Street, when we heard a loud crunching behind us somewhere on Main Street. It was a car driving slowly down the street. We ran up a driveway that led to a big Victorian house on a hill overlooking Main Street. We crossed the yard and crouched down in the bushes that lined the far end and faced the post office’s parking lot. We were thirty feet from the road but could still see it. It wasn’t the black truck, but a silver Chrysler 300. The back window was busted out and a black plastic bag was taped over it. “They stole that car” was the first thought that crossed my mind and I got a little mad, but then I had to chastise myself as I remembered the Pages’ F-150 I was driving around on occasion. Through the window, I recognized the driver as one of the guys who rode in the black truck. The driver was that big black guy who’d been standing in the back of the truck the day they were dragging the body behind them and luring the herd of zombies through the city streets. Out of all the guys I’d seen around the truck, this guy with his rough features, big bushy beard, and a grin that looked purely evil scared me the most. Even more than the guy with the spiky hair and soul patch on his chin who was calling me out and hunting us down a few days ago. There was someone in the passenger's seat, but I couldn’t see who it was. In a few moments, they drove by and turned down the street next to the Safeway and disappeared down Seventeenth.

             
Jr. and I cut across the back of the yard and hopped fences to the back neighbors’ houses till we got to Louisiana. From there, we zigzagged our way down streets and alleys till we got to the alarm house. Along the way, I was thinking about the silver car. This told me two things about the black truck: one, they were going from one place to another for a reason, so they had two locations. And two, naturally they had more than one vehicle, but they were lazy, they didn’t like to get out of the comfort of their cars till they had to. We were on foot most of the time and had the option of going many directions at once. They had to stick to the streets, pathways they were used to before all this mess started. After that, my mind got stuck on the evaluation of what I knew so I just worried about getting us to the alarm house. If they were prowling around the neighborhoods, then we were all in trouble, especially if we were gathered in a large group.