"Sleep," Meghan said. Canyon started down the hall and delivered her to a lovely guest bedroom. The blanket was down, and the mattress was a pillow top. She felt like she was floating. She remembered something as she drifted down to sleep.
"Canyon, you have a CB?" she asked.
"Of course."
"Check channel 3. Our friends, the ones we lost, I think they survived, and if they did they'd be using that channel to look for us."
"Roger wilco. I'll go right over and start broadcasting. Got a good range on my rig, they might be able to hear me even if I can't hear them."
"Of course you do. Tell them we're in heaven," Meghan said as the warmth started to sink in.
"Hah. Well, close enough I guess," Canyon said, and closed the door.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
November 10
After that Ted sent me to get some rest. Dozens of people worked for the rest of the night sealing the gate. It was a difficult task with thousands of zombies trying to force their way in, but keeping all of us up was a waste of resources. At least that is what Ted claimed. I think sending me off to sleep was a good way to ensure that I wasn't spreading panic. And when he picked me to lead the team that was supposed to take back the grocery store, I was honored. But I have to admit that a cynical part of me wondered if maybe this was also his way of ensuring that I wouldn't be alive to break my word.
If I hadn't known what I knew I would have taken it as an honor to be chosen for such an important job. Knowledge can be a curse. Responsibility certainly is.
Fire wasn't an option. We need the place more or less intact, which meant that a whole lot of gunfire was a bad idea too. So I came up with the chute idea. People hated the idea of letting the zombies in any further, but I convinced them that the only way to resolve the situation was to build chutes. Let a hundred or two hundred of them into the chute, then trap them. We could then go to work.
We spent quite a bit of time and lumber on it, but by midday we had two 50 foot long chutes built around the two doors to the grocery store. They were six feet tall, and well reinforced. At 5 feet, they had a foot tall gap. At the entrance they had heavy steel plates, hung like guillotines. They were ready to fall when we wanted to close the chute and reseal the station.
I had teams armed with shotguns ready to go if we had to, but I didn't see the point in wasting ammunition to shoot fish in a barrel. The rest of us had axes, and jury rigged spears. There's a lot of stuff in a hardware store that can adapted to killing zombies. So when we were ready, I reached through the chute and drew back the bar blocking the door. It bulged inwards almost immediately. The lock was about ready to go and I didn't want to have my hand in there when it did, so I ducked away and got ready with my spear. The tension was palpable as the door bulged inward. Finally the lock gave and they spewed in the room with a fantastic howl. The push was so great that quite of few of the frontrunners fell and had their skulls crushed by the feet of their comrades. It only took maybe ten seconds for the whole chute to fill. I yanked the rope holding the guillotine in place, and it fell with a crash, amputating the leg of a zombie. Three of us strained to shove it down, and the guillotine locked into place. Then we went to work.
It was fish in a barrel, but they were diseased, filthy fish. And even if you were Airborne immune, I didn't want to create any new carriers. As much as possible I used bite immune people, but even they were in rain slickers and wearing gloves and masks. It was disgusting work; no one needed a whole lot of persuasion. Immediately we started hacking away. The zombies were helpless. It took only a few minutes to kill all of them. It took longer to drag the bodies up to the roof and throw them over.
Then we repeated, with both chutes.
It seemed like the height of efficiency, but my God. We just kept going and going. Ten times, twenty times. Each time they came with the same density and ferocity. And each time we slaughtered them.
Around the tenth time, they didn't come. We pulled the guillotine open and they just stared at us. Didn't even scream or anything. They looked at us with this dumb, passive look. Not one crossed into the trap. There were still thousands of them in there... but they wouldn't come.
Ted and I looked right at each other. The Herder was in there, telling them to stop the attack.
This put us in quite the pickle. It occurred to me that if this herder was so smart, we might not want to eat anything from the store. God knows what it might put in the food.
I could see that Ted was having the same idea. Poison. Disease. Hell, it would have been harder not to contaminate the food with all the filth it had let in.
So maybe the game wasn't worth the candle. On the other hand, we couldn't let them have the store. It was too dangerous.
I decided to call their bluff.
The building had a false-drop ceiling. I got about ten guys and headed up there. We made our way through the roof on the little trails left for maintenance workers, then pried off the ceiling tiles. Below the mass of zombies was still roiling. All ten of us cut loose with shotguns. You could not miss. Every shot hit two or three zombies at least. If it weren't for the sheer numbers you might have called it a massacre. But even after half an hour of non-stop firing, we had only trimmed the density. Still they refused to attack.
I ordered them to stop for a second. Where was this herder and what was he thinking? With us up here, it was only a matter of time until they were all dead.
"Flashlights," I hissed. I turned mine on and started scanning. We weren't alone up here, I was sure of it. It took a few swings but I was right. I saw its eyes peeking around an air vent, its big blue eyes, fixed too close together in a face that looked like a compendium of every possible birth defect. The eyes where sharp and watery, and conveyed a sense of sheer hate that was almost overwhelming. A zombie lacks the intelligence to hate; it wants to feed and that is the only emotion it has or wants or needs. This thing... perhaps I read too much into it. I only saw its eyes for a second, but I've never felt so hated in all my life.
It pulled back once my lights were on it. I was transfixed, Pete almost had to slap me.
"There's something over that way. And over there too."
I looked. I saw nothing. But at that moment I was the least skeptical man on the planet. It would be hard to walk into that kind of hate on a sunny day; in a dark and cramped maze of shafts and poles it seemed suicidal. Still, for a second it seemed like that was my only option. I had to dislodge them. I looked at Pete. I came close to ordering them to advance.
The mouse becomes fearless. That was the thought that ran in my head.
Perhaps I was a carrier, heedless of the risks? Perhaps I was just stupid, but I almost threw all our lives away in that moment, but thankfully I pulled back.
For whatever reason they hadn't expected this. Why would they know about drop-ceilings? But I had the advantage, because I could fire at their soldiers and they had to charge a bunch of guys with shotguns to stop us. All I needed to do was remain calm.
"Andre, go get more guys." He nodded eagerly and was gone in a split second.
I picked four of the remaining men. I explained that there were zombies in the roof and that they had to stay alert. The rest I told to keep firing. It might take longer that way, but it was safer.
The herders were a lot more agile than I had imagined. I learned that the hard way, when its gigantic claw shot through one of the ceiling tiles and grabbed Jimmy. He fell screaming into the waiting mass below. Other claws burst through looking for targets. The herder's claw–it looks like a human hand, except our nails are more of a nuisance, something that evolution would get rid of if it could be bothered. Its nails had a purpose. They were long and thick and ended in an icepick. Its hand was like a twisted pitchfork.
We started screaming. I had an automatic shotgun, six shells in. I was out as fast as the gun could fire. To this day I have no idea if I hit anything.
Two more men fell. We fumbled to reload, cursing and shaking.
The dread I felt at that moment was a lot like the dread I used to feel when I was a kid and my feet were dangling off the bed. Somehow I had gotten it in my head that there were two corpses under my bed, head to foot. I knew that they would grab my feet and pull me under if I let my feet dangle over the bed. I would wrap a blanket around my feet. Every kid knows blankets defeat all night time monsters.
It was my nightmare come true.
The retreat occurred on its own. We ended up backing away, trying to guess where they were. We put the occasional shot through the tiles just to make sure. I saw a tile bulge, as if someone were slipping a hand around the beam that held it in place. I put a shot through where I guessed the body was. I got the fucker; it screamed that nasty high pitched scream and the zombies below went into full riot mode. I saw part of it as it fell, and the body surfed a wave of zombies for a few bizarre seconds.
I've never seen anything so horrible. It was somehow human, but also not. It was what an alien would build if the only things it knew about the human race were the Universal Man and the pickled exhibits at a museum of defective fetuses.
When that herder fell I think the rest of them decided to call it a day. We waited, the din of the battle below almost ignored as we looked and listened for the slightest sign that they were still there.
Pete came with ten more guys. He looked pale. Later he said he'd seen the bodies fall, and knew we needed help.
The chutes held from their ferocious assault. With twenty of us firing at them as they tried to cram themselves through those tiny doors it ended quickly. Soon enough there were only a few left teetering around. The biggest danger was not the ambulatory zombies, but the risk of infection from the gore. In some places the corpses were four feet high. The entire store ran with rancid, fetid blood. You ever smell a rotten steak? Imagine that with twenty tons of rotten steak. Our first priority was sealing the place up tight, and not just against zombies. We sealed the whole station up like we had the crown jewels. Every exit, no matter how small, was welded shut. Motion detecting alarms were put in places you wouldn't expect them to be. We took every step to make sure they couldn't slip back inside.
On the whole the Battle for the V, as it came to be called, left us down eleven people. The three who had died on the roof and eight who had been in the grocery store, including the only two people who could make canned vegetables taste good. The secret was out. A lot of people had heard the screaming, and had seen what had fallen from the roof, both human and not.
The panic Ted had been convinced would happen didn't. I suppose it was good that the information came out the way it did; with us winning. That softens the blow. But also on some level I think people were almost relieved. They had an enemy, an enemy that could think and plan. While that made survival a lot harder, it somehow comforted people. It was good to have an enemy. Before people had felt like they were fighting against fate, or nature, or the wrath of God made manifest. Being able to see, however dimly, a terrestrial intelligence at work somehow made it easier to swallow.
At least, that's my explanation for it. The panic didn't come, and I do believe people didn't fight about who got the next hot shower quite so much. At least for a few weeks, anyway.
Like everyone else who had seen a herder up close, I was shipped off to New City. The remains of the herder I had killed was stuffed into a PVC crate, floating in alcohol next to me the whole way.
It was my first helicopter ride, and my God, what a depressing sight. As we lifted away I looked around. I realized that I hadn't understood the size of the horde around us. It stretched into hills and gullies and culverts in a way that made it hard to understand from the station. But beyond that was nothing.
Nothing. I had flown before, and you could always look down and see some sign of human life. Cars parked at a factory, or zipping down a highway. The world was motionless now. The lights were all off.
It was a long ride. A long, cold ride. The crew refused to talk to me. I suspect they had orders. Perhaps they didn't know what was in the PVC crate next to me. Or maybe they had talked to so many survivors that they felt like they knew my story already, and wished they didn't.
New City. Well, it was new. That much could not be denied. It made me sad that it was the capitol of the USA. It was all barbed wire, and traps, and moats, and towers. It was built a lot more like a jail than a city. But then what the hell was it supposed to be? It wasn't time to be a city of culture and light. A city of factories and guns was what we needed. My expectations were paradoxical, I guess, and I got more and more disturbed as we got closer. Part of me was upset that it was a military camp, but another part of me was disturbed for a reason I couldn't put my finger on, until days later.
New City wasn't surrounded. There wasn't a zombie to be seen. Tractors rolled around harvesting wheat. Humvees patrolled the edge of the fields with .50 caliber machine guns on the roof, but there were no zombies.
I was paralyzed by agoraphobia. All that open space bore down on me. If I'd been down there, I could have walked for miles and not seen a zombie. I found it terrifying on one level, even though I realized that was a good thing. How could it not be? Of course it was. Of course it was. But it still paralyzed me. I had spent months under constant assault, seeking safety by sealing myself in. I hadn't realized how much of a shut-in I was becoming until the thought of not being under constant assault scared me.
I wasn't quite up to par for quite a while. Mental habits don't just go away ‘cause they don't make sense anymore.
Despite my mixed feelings about New City, it was quite nice. I got my own room in a dorm. I even had my own shower. With hot water! After half an hour someone banged on my door and told me to cut it out, but still. Pretty luxurious. And a bed. With sheets!
Sgt. Pannell came by and took me to a room with cameras. A lot of questions were asked. First what had happened, what I had seen. I told them all about the blue eyes, a fact they found fascinating. I'm not sure they believed me until they opened the crate.