The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree (12 page)

“Well, you don’t,” I interrupt. 
At least I don’t think she does.  My shoulder is scabbed over where she shot me.  Maybe we’re all trying to check out in our own special way.  “We don’t even know if she meant to do it,” I tell them.  “For all we know, it was an accident.  Too much to drink, too many pills.  Death by misadventure is what they call it I think.”  They all nod in agreement.  But I’ve picked one of my own scabs with the idea that I might be quitting, that I might be selling myself out by staying here, staying with Karen.  I can feel it boiling up in me.  It almost feels irrational.  I look over at Eddie and speak to him mostly, “You never quit.  Never give up.  You do whatever it takes.”

He looks tired and overwhelmed
.  It’s easier when you are older.  Life has beaten you up a lot more and you’re better able to take it.  It’s too hard when you’re a kid.  You don’t have the scars to protect you.  You just have wounds that haven’t healed yet.  You’re still too honest, still too trusting.  Still too hopeful. 

“Well, I’m just saying that I think it’s terrible to have to come to that place is all,” Karen says.  She’s hurt.  I’m not sure I care.  The lesbians are staring at me too.  What the fuck am I doing here?

We all retire for the evening on bed rolls, cots, pillows and blankets.  Big Donna snores like a Peterbuilt.  Eddie is out like he’s dead.  I’ll leave him my Ruger.  Karen is curled up on my chest just exactly the way we started the day.  I should feel something for her at this point but I don’t.  I never feel too much of anything anymore.  My wiring feels broken like there’s a fuse box that shuts down every time you turn something on.  I don’t know why I’ve stayed this long.

It’ll be tough to sneak out of here in the morning.  Forgo the stupid questions and insincere good-byes.   But I think I can manage it.  I’ll just be one box of macaroni and cheese less when I hit the road.  I kiss Karen on the forehead and she snuggles into me.  Maybe she’ll understand.  But I doubt it.

I close my eyes and drift off to sleep.  I see Bob fall with a bullet in his side.  I see Tom’s head snap over in a red spray.  I see a room with a little boy hiding; a Zed lies on the floor with an axe stuck in his head.  I see the look in Archie’s eyes just before he died.  I see the tractor.  I see my father’s face.  I see the brass bead on the end of the shotgun barrel.  I hear the hammer click.  I see the tortured look on Dad’s face.  I feel the shotgun jerk against my shoulder.  I feel the darkness as sleep takes me away.

Chapter 16
:  But You Can Never Leave

An owl sits on the corner of the compound as I quietly slip out of the bath house.  Pack in hand, new rifle, new supplies.  Still packing the .45, the cleaver and the big single shot pistol which hasn’t seen any use in a long time.  The sun isn’t up yet as far as I can tell.  The clouds are very heavy and dark and I wonder if the sun will ever shine again.

I walk quietly to the scaffolding to have a look over the top before I head out.  The owl watches me, turning only its big head and big eyes.  We both turn to look out over the road leading into the compound.

Jesus.

There are about a hundred
Zed in front of the gate.  I stand and look at them silently and they stare back up at me.  They are unusually quiet this morning.  They all appear to be more rotten, more decayed.  A girl standing below me is missing her arm but at the end of the stump, the now familiar yellowish spongy growth.  All of them have similar things sprouting out of wounds and growing out of severed limbs.  Whatever it is that has taken over their bodies is becoming less of a parasite and more of a permanent resident of mobile carcasses.  I take a cigarette out slowly and put it in my mouth.  I give Commando Tom’s Zippo a flick and the crowd below me lights up faster than my cigarette.  A big tall bastard with no ears and no shirt opens up with a ferocious scream and the rest join in.  The noise is so sudden and loud and shrill in the calm morning air that I damn near pitch over backwards.

“Wow,” a voice yells from behind and below.  “What the hell did you do?”  The question ends in a short quack of a laugh.  I climb down and walk over to Ray.  He’s dressed in a white karate outfit.  “You
, uh, leaving?” he asks and tugs on the green karate belt around his middle. His big revolver looks out of place against the gi.

I slide the pack of
f and put it on the ground in front of me.  “Well, I was considering it.  But it looks like a bad morning for a walk.”  I take another look at his morning attire but decide not to ask.

He pulls the ends of the belt out away from him.  “Found it.  I always wanted to learn Tai Chi.  Found this, I don’t
know, some kind of karate outfit.  Found a book… seems like a good time to do things I always wanted to do.”  He almost has to shout to be heard over the racket out front.  “But I guess it isn’t the most relaxing and peaceful morning to get started on it.”  He winces and runs a finger into his ear.  “We found coffee.  You want some coffee?”

I follow him into the main house.  All of his people are up.  Kevin, Tyler and Betty must still be crashed out.  Ray hands me a cup of coffee and I sit down at the table.

“Holy smokes,” Ray says and takes a sip of coffee.  “Those things and the constant screaming and moaning and noise.  Enough to make you want to put a bullet in your head.”  A half woven candy bar bracelet sits on the table with a lone pill under it.  “So you were leaving this morning?”

The others in the room all look up at me from the table. 
“Yeah.  Thought about it.”

“Why?  You don’t like the accommodations?”  Ray laughs.  No one else laughs.  “Seriously, though.  You’d have to be about half nuts to go out there by yourself.  I mean
if, uh, what’s-his-nuts was right about the big horde of… things.  Coming.”

The man who had been driving the jeep leans forward and clears his throat. “What are we going to do?”

Ray shrugs.  “Ride it out.  We’re set here in Wayne’s World.”  He leans in a little.  “Wayne was the guy who, uh…” 

“I heard the story,” I tell Ray.  
“Dumb Chuck.”

“Oh yeah,” Ray says his eyes dropping down into mock seriousness.  “And what did Dumb Chuck tell you?   Wait.  Never mind.  It doesn’t matter.  That fucking guy… but, what were we talking about?  Yeah, right,” he snaps his fingers. 
“The wave, the locusts, the zombie tsunami.”

Kevin appears on the stairway and sits down at the table next to me.  He looks terrible.  He fires up a bowl of weed without saying a word.  After a long inhale, he lets it out of his lungs and into the room.  “That’s better. 
Morning.”

“Morning,” I tell him.  “We’re just discussing what to do if there’s really a wave of undead
Zed’s headed this way.”

Kevin’s head shakes up and down.  He pauses for a minute and then hits the pipe again.  “Do we need to do something?”

“That’s what I was saying,” Ray chimes in.  “It’s not like they’re airborne or can crawl over the walls or tunnel in.  What are you worried about, Lou?”

The Jeep driver sets his coffee cup down on the table and fiddles with the handle before talking.  “My dad was in Nam.  He didn’t talk about it much unless he was drinking so he talked about it a lot, if you know what I mean.”  He pushes his coffee cup forward and leans back in his chair.  “He told me a story
one time that I remember really well.  There was a bunch of them, dug in, waiting.  Out there in the jungle.  I don’t remember how many but a few.  So they’re waiting for the Viet Cong to attack but they’re not really sure of the numbers.  They just know there’s going to be a bunch.  So it gets dark, and there was this, just… rush.  All these fucking guys just running straight at them.  So they all open up and start dropping these guys one after the other.  Rifles, machine guns, pistols up close, grenades.  Just let them have everything they had.  So the bodies, the bodies start stacking up.  The guys behind are running up on top of the dead ones and basically, Dad said, they just sat there and kept shooting them as they came in over the top of the pile.  And they were coming in from all directions.  He said there was like this wall of bodies around them and the other guys just kept pouring in.”

“So they shoot and shoot and shoot. And finally one of the VC manages to lob a grenade into the middle and that’s all Dad remembers until he woke up in a hospital.  He was the only
one who survived.  But they told him he was buried under a mound of bodies.  They almost didn’t even find him.”

“So you’re saying,” Ray says and leans in.  “What are you saying?”  He laughs again.  “I mean, I get the story, lot
s of bodies piling up but… what?”

Lou turns his hands up and out, “I’m saying that if there’s millions of these things all coming in a wave, they might stack up outside a place like this.  You
know, barns, houses, stores, whatever, they can get around those, there’s space.  But out there is all vines and weeds and shit and if they start getting stuck, they pile up next to the wall.  You get enough of them, you got a ramp leading right up, in and over.”

“Cofferdam,” Kevin says through held breath
, a fresh hit of pot percolating in his lungs.   

“What’s that?  What did you say?” Ray asks.

“Cofferdam,” Kevin repeats and exhales.  Hank is nodding his head.  Kevin points at Hank.  “He knows what I’m talking about.  We need a break out there in the woods to funnel them around us.  They’re coming in from the east.  We just need to make a cofferdam out of someth’n.”

A man in the back leans forward and offers up an idea.  “We could start shooting them out away from the walls, let them pile up like Lou was talking about.  Except keep them out at about
a hundred yards or whatever.  Don’t shoot the ones up close; just shoot the ones out further.”

“That’s a good idea, Jerry,” Ray says.  “I like that.  We’ll stack some ammunition up around on the catwalk thing and then just have a duck shoot.  First one to get over a hundred wins a stuffed animal.”  He laughs again
.  But again, no one else laughs.

Betty comes down the stairs followed by Tyler.  They both look terrible.  Betty grabs a spot on the couch and Tyler sits next to her.  Kevin shakes his head and says nothing. 

Ray clears his throat and coughs into his hand.  “I want to uh, offer my condolences on your friend.  I obviously didn’t get to meet her but she looked like a beautiful girl.  Really sad.”  Betty and Tyler remain motionless, staring into the patterns of the linoleum floor.  Ray isn’t smart enough to leave it alone.  “You know, I guess the nice thing is, she’s in a better place now.  I mean, it’s so fucked up down here.  I’m sure she was a good person and I’m sure she’s…”

Betty’s voice is soft but crisp and cuts Ray off cleanly.  “Say one more goddamn word about her and I’ll cut your fucking throat.”  She doesn’t look up.  She doesn’t look mad.  But the viciousness, hurt and despair is leaking out of every pore and every syllable. 

Ray looks around the room to see how he should react.  He lets it go without saying another word.

I push away from the table and gather my stuff.  Before leaving, we all agree to meet by the bunker in a little while to start moving ammo and people. 

Halfway across the compound, Karen meets me.  Her eyes are puffy and red.  Everybody looks like shit this morning.  “I thought you left.  I thought you left me.”

I let out a heavy sigh and take her by the arm and walk her back towards the bathhouse.  The
Zed are making so much fucking racket that you can’t really talk over them.  I don’t want to have this conversation shouting.  But then I remember the house isn’t empty.  It suddenly strikes me how rich we were before everyone else came.  Privacy has always been the yardstick of poverty.  I turn her towards the bunker.  We can talk down there.

“You were going to leave me.  Just up and go?” she asks me when we get down the first flight of steps.

I chew the inside of my cheek a little and think.  What to say?  “Yes.” 

“I don’t understand.”  She’s starting to cry again.

“It’s getting messy here,” I tell her.  I put my pack back down and lean the rifle in a corner.  “We all get close, start caring, start depending on each other.  Then bad shit happens. Always does.  Out there,” I motion towards the outside world, “out there by myself, bad shit happens and that’s it.  No mess.”

“I need you,” she says.

I feel like I want to throw up.  But then it passes.  It always does.  The little switch inside flips and all of the heavy feelings, all the misery, drains away into nothing.  Same thing when I start to feel too happy or good.  The drain in the back of my head collects everything that runs over a certain frequency.

I don’t answer.  I just nod my head.  I don’t really want to hurt her.  I don’t want to not hurt her either.  She needs.  And I just don’t want.

She throws her arms around me suddenly and damn near knocks me down.  She cries into my shoulder and kisses my neck.  I leave my arms hanging where they are.  I leave my body with her and go far away. 

I look over her shoulder and see a
small redhead looking down the open door to the bunker.  I push Karen off me and try to think of what other people would say right now.  “We’ll be alright. I’m not leaving.” 

She kisses me and I push her back again.  I motion towards the open door with a nod of my head.  “Good morning,” she says with a big sniff of snot and tears. 

Eddie doesn’t say anything.  The redhead disappears from the opening above.  I grab my stuff and walk away, leaving Karen to collect herself, down there in the dark.

I catch up to Eddie who is milling around outside the bath
house.  “Get your gun,” I tell him and put my stuff back inside.  I open the pack and root through the pockets to find all the ammunition and magazines I can find for the little Ruger.

“My gun?” he asks without moving.  I point at the little .22.  “That’s not my gun.”

“Is now,” I tell him and hand him a big box of little bullets.  “How old are you, 12?  13?” 

“Twelve.”

“I was about your age when I got my first rifle.  And in this world, you’re way overdue.”  He looks back to the rifle and puts his hand back on the barrel.  “I’ll show you how to use it.  How to take care of it.  We’re gonna need someone we can rely on up there on the catwalk when the shit hits the fan.”

Eddie takes the bullets and the magazines and holds them all wadded up in his arms as best he can.  I grab the
Ruger and we walk towards the bowling scaffolding to do a little target practice.  Eddie walks fast to keep up with me and I look up onto the catwalk to where the best place would be.  I see a dark haired woman dancing there and flipping the bird to the people below.  My father sits on the tractor parked by the wall.  Archie’s footprints are still visible in the mud of the courtyard.  And the Zed scream and roar and moan and bang on the metal gate out front.

The ghouls keep us inside but the ghosts live inside us.