“Good, walking sucks.” Smith said immediately.
“Geez dude, you joined the Army.” Whitley said.
“Yeah so?”
“Not just the Army; infantry for Christ’s sake.” she went on. “You’re kidding me, right?”
Smith’s voice was resolute. “One thing I learned as eleven-bravo. Walking sucks.”
“Unbelievable.” Whitley shook her head.
Peter grinned. “He’s not wrong. Walking sucks. Why the hell do you think I went motor pool and made sure I could fix anything with wheels and an engine?”
“Whose side are you on?”
The Marine’s humor abruptly deflated some. He almost said what he thought —
“The living’s.”
— but he instead just settled for shrugging. “Pay attention and let’s get moving. With any luck we can be in better shape by midday.”
Whitley seemed to catch a shadow of his mood from something in his expression, but she didn’t say anything. Nodding, the Guardswoman faced front again and set a steady pace. The trio curved and wandered their way through the zombies, always staying well clear of any grasping hands and hungry teeth. While they didn’t lose too much time to the sidetracking, Peter imagined from above their progress probably looked somewhat like those old cartoons he remembered from the Sunday funny pages.
By the time they got to the first house, Peter had decided how he wanted to handle the matter of the zombies. While the humans were keeping themselves out of reach, the terrain didn’t really allow for any breaking of contact; everything was flat and lacking in ditches, rivers, holes, hills, or anything else that might slow or stop the relentless zombies. The undead bastards were starting to form into clumps that steadily homed in on the three warm, breathing bags of flesh.
They needed to check the houses, but doing so would give the zombies a chance to
really
gather up and invest against the buildings. So when they drew near the first house-and-barn setup, Peter raised his voice slightly. “Okay, you two ease in and run a fast search. You know what we’re looking for.”
“Us?” Smith asked.
“Distraction?” Whitley asked.
“Yeah.” Peter nodded. “I’ll make like a windup human happy meal out here and lead the hungry fuckers around in a circle. Don’t take too long.”
“You going to be okay?” Smith asked.
“I’m armed. I’ll start shooting if I get into trouble.”
“Maybe—” Smith began, but Whitley broke in before he could get any further.
“We’re on it.” she said. “Come on man.”
Smith subsided, and Peter stayed with them right up to the front porch. Whitley checked the door — locked, naturally — then peered through one of the windows before using her club to smash the window out and clear the frame. After a second, longer, look, she ducked through followed by Smith.
At that, when they were both out of view, Peter angled away from the house. He started on a northern course, but as soon as he was able he cut back east. Since he was the only thing visible with a pulse, he predictably pulled the zombies to himself. As he walked, he scuffed his feet and kicked at rocks when able; making a decent amount of noise. Occasionally he waved the piece of bed frame he was using as a hand weapon in the air, or in the direction of the zombies who were watching and following his progress.
As far as he could tell, every zombie in view that wasn’t idling was locked on to him like missiles. Slow, shambling, shuffling, clumsy missiles; but unerringly continuing to pursue. Scribing an enormous circle through a field of some sort of food plant that was starting to spread beyond its formerly neatly planted rows, he maintained his steady walking pace. It wasn’t tiring, but even so seeing the zombies was a stark reminder that all it would take for him to die was to simply stop moving.
That was it. Simply that. Just stop walking, and another minute or two later he’d be torn apart by a crowd of zombies. They weren’t fast, but they just kept coming. And his curving course across the field was starting to gather the closest pursuers into a somewhat larger clump. While their numbers were still relatively small for now, it was unpleasantly similar to the hordes yesterday that had led to taking a high dive into the Mississippi in near freezing conditions. A few turned into a few more, then it was a crowd, then before you knew it you were looking at a full on horde that was ready to rip you apart.
“Stay cool jarhead.”
he thought, keeping his breathing even. Plenty of room to maneuver right now, no problem. Nice steady pace, a walk in the park, no DIs or impatient officers yelling for more speed . . . no problem at all. Just keep walking.
He circled in the field twice for maybe ten minutes before he saw Whitley and Smith emerge and head over to the barn. They disappeared inside, giving him time to take another several-hundred-yard long lap through the abandoned crops before they came out and waved at him. Waving back, Peter cut his latest circle as much as he felt was reasonable and joined them.
“Proper jackets.” Whitley said, gesturing to the winter wear they had both donned. She also had a Remington shotgun in her hands.
Peter nodded. Everyone had brought
some
cold weather gear, but most of it had been in the truck or their packs; now lost on the railroad bridge. “Anything else?” he said, ignoring the obvious appearance of the long gun.
“A better bag, couple more pounds of food.” Smith said. He’d ditched the makeshift pack they’d just rigged up for one of those stupid new-style ‘backpacks’ that only had one strap, so it hung across the body. Peter thought they were dumb, but college kids seemed to like them.
“What the hell do I know?”
he shrugged mentally. “That it?” he asked aloud.
“Found some bleach too.” Whitley said. “We transferred it into some jars and wrapped them up so they won’t clink around too much.”
“Not as good as water, but it puts us in business.” Peter said, approval in his eyes as he read her ‘what-can-you-do’ expression. “Finding some water probably won’t be too rough, so we’ll be able to drink it safely now.”
“Could’ve been worse.” Smith said, sounding slightly more cheerful now. “House could’ve been full of zombies.”
“Famous last words.” Whitley snorted.
“Whatever, let’s keep going.” Peter said, glancing over his shoulder. The clump of zombies he’d rounded up — now numbering past several dozen — was getting close.
“Onward.” Whitley nodded, leading them off again.
Another house turned up a little more food, and some barns yielded axes and replacement tool handles they traded their clubs for. Whitley found a pair of work gloves that fit her reasonably well, and Smith managed to use some light rope to lash some soda bottles to the outside of his pack without having to stop to work on it.
But no vehicles; none that worked anyway. Everything seemed flat and without the necessary mechanical spark to run. They found a battered truck that had been parked with its hood up, but Peter decided it wasn’t worth stopping to screw around with. Parts of the exposed engine showed a serious accumulation of rust. Two more cars were also skipped; one was missing the battery, and the second didn’t even turn over when Peter bypassed the ignition module and tried to directly hotwire it.
By mid-morning, Peter was starting to get disturbed about how many zombies they’d collected. The pack now officially qualified as a horde as far as he was concerned; well past the ‘big crowd’ stage. It didn’t seem like the trio of humans were headed into an area of denser monster concentration, but after the bridge he was extremely wary of the possibility of being sandwiched between two such hordes.
Even though — out on open ground like this — the odds of them getting boxed in were far more remote.
What he was concerned about was fatigue. While he and the soldiers were in pretty good shape after two months of tough living amid the deteriorating conditions following the outbreaks, there was still a limit. And he knew he’d reach his a lot sooner than the other two. They were both in their mid-twenties; he was nearly sixty. Good shape or not, he could already feel the burn building up in his legs and back as they kept walking.
A more likely ‘oh-shit’ scenario he could envision wasn’t being trapped amid multiple hordes; it was running into a situation like that and finding he didn’t have enough gas in his tank to get himself clear. Zombies were slow, but if enough of them showed up from the right — or wrong, depending on whether the determiner had a pulse or not — angles and he might not be up to running long and hard enough to escape the trap.
“Let’s try something at this house.” he said as they approached another structure.
“What?” Whitley asked.
“Need me to spell you on distraction duty?” Smith asked.
“Maybe.” Peter told Smith, glancing at him briefly. “But first, let’s give this a whirl. Rip through the place like you’ve been doing, but when you’re done, I want you to pile up anything you think might be edible to a zombie out front. Stuff from the freezer.”
Whitley’s tone made it clear she wasn’t happy with this plan. “Jesus Gunny, you know how fucked up anything in the fridge is going to be after this long?”
“Yeah, I do. I just hope zombies still like it.”
“Why are we going to put ourselves through that?” Smith pressed.
“After you search and dump the shit, I’ll lead the zombies into the house and we’ll close it up.”
“I don’t know that any regular house is going to stand up to this many of them fuckers if they start pounding on it.”
“Yeah, are we down to a last stand scene already?” Whitley added.
“No.” Peter said, shaking his head. “We’ll duck inside, close up the front, then leave through the back and see if we can’t break contact with our trailers.”
The two soldiers were silent for a moment, then Whitley spoke again. “Okay, not bad.”
“Yeah, that’s worth a shot.” Smith said.
“Glad you approve.” Peter nodded. “Let’s give it a go then.”
“Sure I can’t take over Pied Pipering now?”
Peter allowed a sour grin to cross his face when Smith glanced at him. “My plan, so I’ll pull a little rank and take the rough job for myself.”
“I notice you didn’t say the dirty one.”
“Nope.”
Smith made a face at that, but fell silent.
They crossed the latest field and again divided; Whitley and Smith heading for the structure while Peter circled away at a slower pace to tempt the zombies. He made two broad laps before he saw his companions emerge. They threw some stuff in the yard just in front of the house, and he saw Smith stagger away before doubling over. It looked like he might be vomiting. Whitley ignored that, and just waved in an oversized gesture at Peter before heading back inside.
In the time it took Peter to complete his third circuit and angle in at the house, Whitley made three more trips and Smith managed two; though the Guardsman threw up a second time. When Peter made it into the yard, he smelled it from yards away.
Zombies smelled bad; there was no getting around it. They were fetid and foul all the way, with nothing fresh or pleasant about them. What information doctors and the medical establishment had managed to figure out and disseminate before the crisis turned into collapse indicated a zombie was someone who had died. How they did this and still walked and chewed and killed was anyone’s guess, but the simple fact was a zombie was a walking corpse.
Bodies decayed. Peter wasn’t an expert on death, but he’d seen bodies. And not just freshly killed ones either; he’d seen what he felt was his share of people who’d died weeks or months earlier in some of the warzones he’d been deployed to. When a region was consumed with conflict, the various combatants and controlling entities didn’t always have the luxury of collecting and burying the dead. Sometimes the corpses just lay there for quite a while, decomposing for everyone to see.
When someone died, they lost the luster of life. Flesh and tissue started rotting; there was no other word for it. And the process didn’t just look bad. It
smelled
something awful.
The really fucked up, and unfortunate, thing about zombies was that they only rotted so far. A few curious civilians with iron stomachs and a disregard for the macabre in Cumming had done some investigating of dead zombies. Really dead ones; those who’d been put down and were inert. Most of the internal organs — from heart and lungs to kidneys and intestines — seemed to be rotted. Some of the skin completely disintegrated, and the rest of it suffered a moderate level of decay. Bones, of course, didn’t decompose on either zombies or humans after death.
But that was where decomposition ended. Most of their skeletal muscles were more or less intact. Peter had looked over the ‘reports’ from the investigations, and of course he’d had plenty of opportunities to observe the real thing. The zombies decayed just enough to look and smell really bad, but not enough to crumble and cease to be dangerous. If they were damaged they wouldn’t heal, but absent trauma they kept moving, walking, crawling, grabbing, and eating.
But as bad as a decaying zombie smelled, what Whitley and Smith had hauled out of the farmhouse’s kitchen was worse. He wouldn’t have believed it, but there
were
worse things than zombies. At least as far as his nose was concerned. Two months in an enclosed space, some of that time the fading days of fall when temperatures would still be in the 70s and 80s . . . rank didn’t even begin to describe it.