Deadlocked 5 (6 page)

Fat raindrops struck the dirt with heavy thuds as the storm rolled overheard. I set Stubs down and we made our way into the field where the grass had been shorn. It was clear that cattle had grazed here. I could see their tracks and recognized their droppings, several of which still attracted flies. I hoped that Stubs would take the lead, perhaps eager to return to where he came from now that we were in a place that was familiar to him, but he lingered at my side, fearful and cautious.

That's when the sweet smell of death struck me. A gust of wind carried the scent out from the nearby industrial zone. It was faint, as we were still a couple hundred yards away, but it was unmistakable. Some people theorized that humans have a strong reaction to the smell of rotting corpses as a defensive mechanism that we evolved because rotting meat carries with it a host of diseases. In this new world where corpses hunt the living, the ability to smell death was an invaluable sense.

I should've turned around. I hadn't survived twenty years past the end of days because I took chances. There was nothing to be gained by moving on except the useless answer to where Stubs had come from. This wasn't part of my mission. There was no reason to keep moving, but I did.

My Glock was chambered and ready to fire. My poncho was sleeveless and I held the pistol under it to keep it from getting wet. I wasn't worried about the rain affecting its ability to shoot now, but getting water into the mechanisms of a gun is something that's always good to avoid if possible.

Raindrops pounded the earth with growing frequency. I regretted bringing Stubs as he sauntered along behind me, frightened of both the storm and what he knew we were walking into. I was hoping he could help me track down where he came from, but he would rather crawl in a hole and hide from the storm than anything else. Every crack of thunder caused his back to arch as if he were trying to tuck his stubby tail between his legs in terror.

"Come on then," I said and scooped him back up. There was a pocket on the outside of the poncho that was large enough for him to fit the majority of his body into. His head and two front paws poked over the edge and I had to pull on the left side of the poncho to straighten it out after his weight dragged it off balance.

The industrial plant was fenced off, and it was hard to tell what sort of facility it had been before the apocalypse. I wasn't as familiar with buildings like this because I generally avoided them. It had four smokestacks, and the central building was at least fifty feet tall, with only a spat
tering of tiny windows along its otherwise flat walls. The elements had ravaged the construction and large chunks of siding had been stripped away, exposing steel beams beneath that looked skeletal in the flashing lighting. The fence was strung with loops of razor wire and corrugated metal walls lined the outer portion. Animals had wormed their way into several openings, but I noticed recent repairs that revealed their youth by shimmering in the light.

Who would take up residence at an industrial park?

Survivors desperately tried to form new societies after the apocalypse. Large groups of people banded together and took back entire towns all across the western United States. They would secure a portion of a city, fence it off, and then set about determining the way their new union would survive. Many of these colonies broke apart due to internal bickering, but many more were able to establish a strong foundation for what they hoped would become the seed of a new civilization. For the better part of the first decade, I found solace in several of these newly established colonies. I traveled between them, hitching rides with trade caravans that operated between some of the larger townships. Despite the horror that we'd witnessed, there was exuberance among the Reds back then. They actually thought things would get better in time. They were wrong.

Once the mutated zombies began to appear, we discovered that life would never be easy again. This second wave of the disease created walking dead that were immune to the bacterial growth that killed the original zombies, the ones we'd begun calling 'Poppers' due to their propensity for internal hemorrhages. The mutated zombies could live indefinitely as long as they fed, but unlike the Poppers, the new zombies, which we called 'Greys' due to their distinctive skin color, were happy to feed on animals if necessary.

The Greys descended upon the towns slowly at first, but their numbers grew at a frightening rate. The lights and sound of a living colony attracted them, and they were desperate to get in. Many towns did an admirable job of protecting themselves from the invasion, but then the original virus reappeared. Suddenly, as the towns were trying to keep the Greys out, the virus demolished them from the inside out.

A few forts have managed to survive, but the vast majority of the larger, fortified towns have long since fallen. These days it was easier to keep moving. The Greys are slow, and they travel in packs, which means they're easy to avoid if you don't stay in one place for too long. The virus that causes the Poppers seems to require that people stay in one place for a long time to get started, which also made a nomadic lifestyle attractive. That's why this industrial park, which had clearly been used as a permanent home for someone, was an anomaly.

I followed the fence around to what had once been a parking lot. The side of the fence was scorched, and the plants on my side of it looked young, as if they'd sprouted within the past month or two. When I rounded the corner of the fence and stepped onto the concrete parking lot I noticed that the signs of scorching marred the ground there as well. Every six feet there was a hole cut in the bottom of the fence that a metal pipe was pushed through. I knelt down and stuck my finger into one of the pipes and discovered a thick, black residue. I sniffed it and realized it was a fuel of some type. This fence was a trap. Anything that was drawn to it could be set aflame by an innovative delivery system of accelerant.

The fence connected to the building that five vehicles, each covered by a tarp, were parked in fron
t of, but there was also a gate closer to me that was partially open and led into a second paved lot. I felt exposed and vulnerable as I snuck along the edge of the fence. I knew that I was walking along an area that was used as a trap, but the system seemed designed for Greys, and not for humans; or so I hoped.

Lightning snapped through the air nearby, the thunder wasting no time chasing it, and the industrial building was illuminated long enough for me to get a better view of it. Above me, probably forty feet high, I saw a chair positioned near the corner of the building, inside a piece of broken exterior, looking down on the parking lot. It was used as a watchtower, and if someone had been sitting there then they already knew I was coming. I cursed my foolishness. This was a quest I didn't need to take, and it was getting worse by the second.

I would've normally accepted that I'd been caught and called out to reveal I meant no harm, but the smell of death was too prevalent to ignore. If someone was still alive here, then they'd learned to live with a ghastly stench, and that didn't seem plausible. More than likely the person, or people, that lived here had been caring for Stubs and were dead now. That would explain how Stubs had come to me, and might also explain the Popper that showed up at my door.

The gate was ajar. I was able to peer through it and into the lot beyond. It had once served as a secondary parking lot, probably for privileged employees of the plant, but it had been converted into a yard for livestock. There was a wooden structure in the back and several
troughs lined up along the sides. Bales of hay had been set along the fence and there were cow pies littering the cracked pavement. Despite the evidence of a herd, there wasn't a single living creature to be seen.

Animals, even livestock, are a lot smarter than people give them credit for. Wh
en there's any sign of a zombie they flee immediately. They were clearly a hell of a lot smarter than me. I knew this place was a tomb, almost certainly the site of a zombie attack, but I continued on anyhow. I avoided the yard, convinced it held no more secrets for me, and made my way to the parked vehicles in front of the main entrance.

There was another fence on the other side of the cars, and it stretched out to my left for at least a hundred yards. The plant was at the intersection of the fences, and they were tall enough that I couldn't see what was beyond them. There didn't seem to be a gate on the longer fence l
ike there was on the livestock area, which led me to believe there would be an entrance to the larger lot inside of the building.

The plant had a set of double doors for an entrance and a series of windows looking out onto the parking lot that had been boarded up. There were no vines snaking their way along the walls, another sign that someone had been tending to this structure. I moved to the door and pushed at it with my foot to see if it was unlocked. It didn't budge, but that was because it opened outward, a fact I should've realized since the hinges were on my side. I felt foolish for my mistake, but the only witness was Stubs, and he couldn't make fun of me even if he wanted to.

I tried again, this time pulling on the door's handle instead of kicking at it, and discovered that it was unlocked. I put my foot in the opening and pointed my Glock inside, then pulled the door open with my left leg. It swung easily, which meant that someone had been oiling the hinges. I hadn't encountered a fortification like this in years, and I had a growing suspicion that this place had been used to house far more than just a few survivors. This had the feeling of a colony designed to feign dilapidation. It was set off the road several hundred yards on a downgrading hill, and the entrance was through a crumbling industrial plant. The animals were kept at the entrance, which made me wonder if they had been a major part of the colony's trade. Having them positioned at the gate would keep any traders from discovering the true population hidden behind the fence. Also, if a horde of Greys ever sniffed out the livestock, they would focus on the outer pen and allow the occupants of this colony an opportunity to burn them alive, all while the residents were safely packed inside the other gate.

The plant was gutted and filled with an army of mannequins that were fully dressed and scared the living shit out of me when I first saw them. Most of them were overturned and several had their limbs or head ripped off. Each one had been carefully designed to mimic a living person and there were bells tied to their clothes. It was an ingenious warning system that I was disappointed in myself for never thinking of. The Greys wouldn't be able to distinguish between a living person and these dummies upon first sight. If a horde managed to slip through the open field, unspotted by the guard positioned in the watchtower, then they would be discovered once they entered this area and tried to ravage the plastic, chiming army within. I wonder how much time the zombies would waste knocking over the mannequins in this room before looking for a different victim.

The only thing in the room other than the mannequins was a stack of pallets. The fact that they were here convinced me that this building had been used for offloading trade. This stack was probably put here for the next caravan that came calling and would be given back to whoever they were trading with.

If they required multiple
pallets worth of trade items, then this was a massive colony I'd stumbled on. In two decades I'd only encountered a few caravans that bothered strapping their trade to pallets, and that was back when thousands of survivors had lived in structured settlements. In this age of re-emerging hunters and gatherers, the idea that a caravan was still selling pallets worth of goods came as quite a shock.

There was another set of double doors at the back of the building that was protected by an iron gate that had probably been installed when this building was converted into a makeshift gatehouse. I stared up at the system of catwalks that crisscrossed the structure as rain blew in from the holes in the side of the building. There was no access onto the catwalks from inside. The way up must've been located on the other side of the iron gate. This room was designed as a murder hole, where anyone daring to enter would be susceptible to the whim of the guards above them.

The iron gate swung open easily and without the normal screech you'd expect to hear. Stubs whimpered in my pocket and tried to spin around, but there wasn't enough room for that. He did his best to duck his head, but his huge eyes still peered over the edge.

I pushed the bar handle of the back door to see what this gatehouse had been designed to protect. As if on cue, lighting flashed as the door opened and revealed the largest colony I'd seen in over a decade.

It was a shocking sight to behold and was a beautiful contrast to the dead world I'd been forced to live in for the past twenty years. There were no buildings, and the residents had learned to abide within yurts, lined up in rows, that stretched for three or four hundred yards. There were flowers everywhere, blooming brilliantly at the entrance of each abode and hanging from posts along a central thoroughfare. A ten-foot wide moat separated me from paradise and ran the entire length of the fence as a defensive back up. If a portion of the fence was breached, the attacker would plunge into the deep reservoir on the other side. On the opposite bank of the moat there were sharpened stakes buried into the dirt pointing out, making climbing out of the ditch unharmed nearly impossible. Directly in front of me was a metal bridge that was connected to a crank on the other side. Luckily for me it was already down.

I would've been excited about discovering a place like this if it weren't for the familiar buzz of flies and stench of death that pervaded the area. Something was dead here, and that never bode well. I'd survived twenty years after the apocalypse by knowing better than to walk into places like this. I should've turned around and allowed the place to fester for a few more days before exploring. If the Popper that died in my kitchen had come from here, then it was reasonable to think any other zombies that originated from this colony would die off within a few days.