Dead Hunger III: The Chatsworth Chronicles (20 page)

I was acutely aware of the urgency of our trip, but we didn’t need to die, either.  I put the three tanks on the ground outside the mobile lab and opened the foremost storage compartment.

“What’s up?” Flex called from his open window.

“
That streaming spray’
s good for pinpoint spraying a zombie’s face
, but we’re going to need more of a fan
pattern to soak more of the z-rats.”

“Fuckin’ z-rats,” said Flex.  “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse.  What do you have in mind?”

I found what I was looking for and pulled the hammer out of the compartment.  “I need to flatten the nozzles.  They’re plastic, but this should get them where I need them.”

I put the nozzle down on the ground and hit it hard three times.  To my relief, it didn’t crack, but narrowed to a slit against the concrete sidewalk.

I held it up and gave it a quick burst. The liquid fanned out in a six-foot wide spray pattern.

“Just like a fuckin’ Lawn Boy,” said Flex.  “Brilliant, Hemp.”

“Thanks,” I said, and smashed the other two.  I handed one up to Flex and carried one each to the other two vehicles.

“Use sparingly,” I said, as I gave them the cylinders.  “They only have to get a drop on them.”

I ran back to the dump truck, and jumped in the passenger seat.  Flex hit the gas and followed the others.

****

Reeves had rounded up six men besides himself, and they all wore full-body Tivek suits.  There was no guarantee these men were all immune to the urushiol, so it was a good idea.  He was testing himself, though.  Based on his experience with his father, he chose not to wear one, but he did wear long sleeves because of the weather.

So did Flex and I, but more to keep the sticky oils off our skin.  Once there, if you touched someone else, they could easily get the dermatitis, which could be quite severe.

It was still hard to explain sometimes.  The immunity to urushiol meant you were also immune to the zombie gas.  It did not mean that poison ivy caused people to turn into zombies.  It was almost as ridiculous as the people who were afraid to give blood because they thought they would get some disease.

And they are out there, in huge numbers.  I suppose there aren’t many people giving blood these days, anyway.

To Reeves’ credit, he had rounded up all the doctors and nurses in
Concord
and kept an area of the hospital functional.  They’d had huge burials and burnings reminiscent of the days of the black plague, but with perhaps a bit less superstition.  Though for the life of me I can’t imagine why; this epidemic is a hell of a lot harder to explain than the black plague. 

This was an illness like no other in the history of humankind.  One that could easily be the end of humankind.

Many had tried.  All had failed.  And now with the rats getting involved, this affliction appeared to have an ace up its bony sleeve.

Onto the harvest.  I can tend to bloviate a bit too much, which might make my chronicles more difficult to get through than Flex’s or Gem’s.  They did a good job.  My teeth were clenched plenty when I read them.  It was as though I were reading something that happened to someone else.

The part about Max was hard.  I didn’t realize what he
had
meant to me until he was beneath that pile of diggers, being eaten alive.  The worst human being on the planet didn’t deserve such a fate, and he was nearly the opposite of that person.

“Hemp, can you drive this rig?”

“Did you notice the rig I drove across the damned country?” I asked.

Flex laughed.  “Yeah.  Come to think of it.  I’ll guide you.  The ivy is back there, and I can’t back for shit using side mirrors.  Where do you want me?”

I laughed.  “There is something the amazing Flex can’t do?”

“Hey, you developed the opinion,” he said.  “About all I can do well these days is kill zombies.”

“Just stand over where you want me to stop and I’ll get there.”

Flex walked deep in to the field with the other men.  There was a thick copse of trees bordering the field, which was overgrown to the tun
e of maybe three to four feet tall. 

“The poison ivy is intermixed with the main grass here, but it’s really concentrated near the tree line,” said Reeves. 

I heard it from the cab, my window open.  I knew what Flex was thinking without a word from his mouth.

He’d had enough of fuckin’ tree lines.

I’d ask him later.

“Bring it on back, Hemp!” he shouted, and pulled the shift into reverse.  Damned automatic dump trucks.  Seemed like cheating, to quote Charlie. 

Guns vs. urushiol.  Manual shift vs. automatic.

I watched Flex’s hand in the passenger side mirror until he raised his palm to me.  I threw it in to park and got out.  The fabric cover over the bed was already retracted, so I opened the rear gate and readied it for loading.

“Let’s make fast work of this,” said Flex.  “Three leaves, that’s the shit we need.  Grab any and all of it you can, and keep grabbing it unti
l
we can’t fit anymore in the back of this truck.”

“Wait,” I said, and went back to the cab.  I grabbed Flex’s new
HK53.  It chambered 40 5.56 x 40mm NATO rounds, and had a reload time of 4.3 seconds.  Beat the crap out of my MP5, but I liked it.  I didn’t know if Gem was going to stick with her backup Uzi or keep Flex’s Daewoo K7, but I knew if she wanted it, he’d let her have it.

I handed it to him, my H&K over my shoulder.
  The other men had their fire extinguishers in close proximity to them, and ours was right behind the truck.

We gathered.  And we gathered.  Until our arms were sore.  I kept looking back toward the direction of the cemetery, which was just northeast of where we now worked, albeit a couple of miles, at least. 

I wasn’t so sure the rats couldn’t just walk right over the poison ivy plants – they had fur to protect them, after all.  But if they got it on them and it rained later, they’d be in for a nasty surprise.  Once it made it to their skin, they’d be a melted mess – or at least I hoped.

“Notice anything about these plants, Flex?” I asked, after more than an hour picking.  The truck was about half full.

“They’re not huge,” said Flex.  “Are they normal sized?”

“Almost,” I said.  “Maybe a bit larger than ordinary, but you’d have to know to look for it to notice.  The granite really has made a difference here.”

Flex grunted and pulled more plants up by their roots.  He looked at them.

“Anything in the roots, bud?”

“Minuscule,” I answered.  I hadn’t thought to ask if they had access to machetes, but I didn’t want to sound ridiculous. 

Hey, have you got a purple and blu
e striped fan rake I can borrow?  With tiny red hearts painted in a circle on the tip of the handle?

What the hell’s gotten into me?

I was about to share my internalization with Flex, but he’d stopped in mid pull of an ivy plant, and was staring into the trees.

I moved toward him and whispered, “What is it?”

“I thought I saw a face in the trees.”

I looked.  “Where?”

“I blinked, and it’s gone.”

There was rustling in the distance, then steady crunching, as though someone were running through leaves and brush.

“There!” said Flex.  “I knew it!”

“Can’t be zombies,” I said.  “They’re drawn to us, they never run away.”

We heard another sound.  Like a radio.  Squelch, then almost a whistle and static.

“Wha – did you hear that, Hemp?”

“I heard it, too,” said Reeves, coming up to us.  “Wasn’t you?”

“Nope.  My radio’s been quiet,” said Flex.  “Would any of your people be patrolling the woods, Kev?” he asked.

“No reason to that I knew of.  Now maybe we should be looking to see who is.”

“Military?’ I asked.

“Like I said,” said Reeves, “they disbanded when this crap hit and went to their families.  Maybe some of them decided to regroup.”

“Be nice if they just joined the group and worked with your folks,” said Flex.

I looked at the truck, then back at the men.  “Once we load what we’ve got torn up here, I think we’ve got enough to last us a while.  I’ve already formulated our immediate use of it, but I really believe we need to have regular parties gathering out here.  When we get through all this, we need to find more.”

“I’d say it’s the most precious commodity in the world right now,” said Flex. 

He was right.  Urushiol was the new water.  It gave life by easily eliminating things that would mindlessly take it from you.
 
Urushiol and its blends were literally priceless, and no amount of money in the world could buy it.

At least not yet.  The world had not corrupted itself again since this bizarre apocalypse – at least I didn’t think it had.  Not yet. 

In time, I was sure it would.

The men started loading up the rest of what they’d harvested.  I stood facing the forest and stretched,
and
saw a flash in the trees.  Something had appeared on the ground just inside the trees, maybe fifteen feet. 

It gleamed gold, despite the overcast sky from the earlier rainstorm that had ripped through
Concord
.  I looked back at the others, who were carrying armloads of poison ivy to the dump truck.  I was alone.  It would only take a second to see what it was, and I was armed.

I moved quickly toward the woods, my gun out.  I kept my eye on it, and realized it seemed to be getting smaller as I approached it.  A light?

Was that a screen?  I could almost make it out.  Seven more steps and I’d be there.

A radio.  I looked around, releasing the safety on my H&K.  I saw no one, and bent over to pick it up.

I held a Yaesu portable Ham radio in my hand, identical to the one I used when I was on the move.

And it was powered on.  I turned to run.

A sound came from overhead, and a body dropped down on top of me.  Then two more beside me.

My gun was out of my hands in a half second,
a hand was over my mouth,
and I found myself being propel
led backward through the forest.  Seconds later a hood was pulled over my head.

I heard my name in the distance, but I couldn’t respond.  Maybe they would hear the rustling as I was pulled deeper and deeper into the woods, but I could see nothing, and now that I was unarmed, blind, and dumb, I was a prisoner.

I tried to relax.  I tried to breathe and take in what was happening to me.  I would use my mind to analyze the situation and gather any data I might be able to use later.

I thought of Charlie.  My Charlie.  My god, how worried would she be?  What would she do?  We’d just lost Cynthia and Todd, and now she would believe she’d lost me.

How long had we been moving?  A half hour?  Was Flex running through the woods toward us right now, guns ready to blaze and free me from these men?

I felt the men slowing.  They stopped.  Waited.

“We’re at E point,” said one of them.  “Clear.”

“In five,” the voice came over the radio.  “Prepare.”

Then out of nowhere, the voice said, “Welcome, professor Chatsworth.  I’ve been wanting to meet you since
Georgia
.”

I would not have know what to say even had I been able to speak at that moment.

All I could think of was Charlie.

I heard the chopper long before I felt the wind churning from his spinning, deafening rotor blades.

My heart pounded with it.  I was going away.  So far away from my friends, my family.

My wife. 

I could do nothing to stop it.

I was whisked toward the waiting chopper, and I felt the grass whipping around my legs as I was thrown aboard and it lifted from the ground.

I heard machine gun fire over the rotors, felt a bullet rip through the fuselage near me.

I heard and felt them firing back, hot shells peppering my body where I lay, hooded and helpless.

And then
,
there was only the sound of wind and the chopper.

I was gone.

Chapter 7

My name is Charlene Chatsworth, and I’m not supposed to be writing this.  This was supposed to be Hemp’s chronicle. 

He’s my husband, and he was taken from me on what I can honestly describe as the shittiest day of my life.  If I didn’t have Flex and Gem and the two girls, I can’t tell you that I’d have lived through it.

Can’t leave out Dave and Lisa. 
They’ve
become like my own brother and sister, even though I’m an only child and have no idea what it would be like.  I’m pretty sure I missed out on all the teasing and bullshit from an older brother, but I would’ve loved to have a younger sister like Lisa.  She’s full of piss and fire like me.