The Zombie Wars: The Enemy Within (White Flag Of The Dead Book 8) (11 page)

While he climbed, I scouted around, circling out from the tree. I found old horse manure, several wrappers, a few cigarette butts, and what looked like an old entrance to the nearby field. I figured it had to be some farmer’s old access to the now overgrown land. I also found where a vehicle had turned in and had driven across the field.  It looked as if this had happened recently.

Charlie came down a minute later. “Well, it’s a zip line,” he said. “It serves no other purpose.”

“Where does it go?” I asked.

“Over into those trees. I tried to use the telescope, but it’s nothing but leaves.”

“Let’s go take a look,” I said.

“Take the car?” Charlie asked.

“May as well.”

We drove carefully, trying to move as quietly as possible. The field was pretty flat, so we travelled well, and we eventually came to the edge of the woods.  The trees were hard at work trying to reclaim the land they had lost generations ago, and as we got closer, I could see a kind of fence among the trees.

“Stop here,” I said.

Charlie stopped, and we both got out.  Following the fence, we made our way along until we reached a building. It was a two-story structure with several openings in the side which resembled ticket booths.  A faded sign read ‘Arkansas Renaissance Faire.’ In front of the entrance were our two scout vehicles.

“Are you kidding me?” Charlie said.

“Apparently not,” I said.  “Wonder where our scouts are?”

“John.  Over here,” Charlie said. He was standing by the front of the vehicles.

I went over and saw four dead zombies, two males and two females. They were not as old looking as some we had seen lately, so I figured them to be locals who turned recently.

“Okay,” I said. “These aren’t our scouts, so that’s a hopeful sign,” I said.

“I guess so,” Charlie said. 

“Well, they all came this way, and the zip line guy isn’t around, so let’s see what we can see,” I said, slipping my rifle off my shoulder and making sure a round was chambered.

We walked to the entrance and found the heavy doors were locked.  Charlie went over to the side of the gate and climbed up, slipping over quietly. A second later, the gate opened, and I passed inside.

The interior of the fair was surprisingly well maintained. There were rows of structures and dwellings with large trees providing a decent canopy over everything. There seemed to be a town square in front of us with a fountain, several fruit trees, and a small kid park.  Down to our left was a massive building which in its day was likely the admin offices for the fair. The place was easily as large as a good-sized house, rising at least three stories in the air.

As we walked further in, we saw abandoned booths that looked like they held archery ranges and knife throwing boards.
“Do you think anyone lives here?” Charlie asked.

“Right now, I would say yes,” I said looking around. The open lanes that wound through the trees were flanked on both sides by various shops and living quarters.  It looked like the people who ran this place retreated here when the world ended and just stayed.  From a tactical standpoint, they had shelter, a high fence to keep out the zombies, water, game to hunt, and land to grow food in.

We walked around an open area that looked like it was the place where crops were grown. A small lake on our left sported a bridge that led to another section of the village and a large wooden boat. The laundry lines told me someone lived there, although where they were was a mystery.

Crossing the bridge brought us to a very congested area.  Buildings were pretty much on top of each other and crowded the available space. Huge trees in the middle of the lanes served at turning points for the streets.

“This is a lot different than what I expected a Renaissance fair to look like,” Charlie said. “These buildings are pretty permanent. I was expecting a bunch of tents and hay bales.”

“Same here. Went to one of these a while back; seemed like it was a more of an escape from reality than an actual fair,” I said.

We went up a hill, and when we reached the top, we heard a noise like cheering.  Looking down, we could see through the tree branches. In a clearing, we could see around two hundred people, most of them sitting in wooden stands. As we walked closer, we could see several people performing tricks and acrobatics, and on a small private pavilion, there were two people and our four scouts.

“What the hey?” Charlie asked.

“I think we can safe our rifles,” I said. “I think these people are harmless.”

Turns out they were. Once we made our presence known, the people who lived on the fair grounds were eager to show us their acts.  I told them we would bring back a much larger crowd than the six of us, and if they wanted to bring their best out to play, we could certainly bring the audience.

Man, that did it. The crowd went nuts, and there was a general scurry for costumes and a lot of “Huzzah!s”, whatever that meant.  The scouts were a little embarrassed for the fuss they caused, but Charlie and I chalked it up to good community relations, and that was enough.

We went back to the front entrance, and by the time we got there nearly every house had a bunch of noise and activity.  These people had lived here for two years without seeing anyone else, and at heart they were performers.  So when they were offered a chance to play for a larger crowd, of course, they were excited.

The six of us walked through another row of shops and performing stages and headed for the front entrance. We were feeling pretty good about having a distraction for the army that everyone could enjoy, and we nearly walked into the horde of zombies that was waiting for us on the other side of the gate.

“Jesus!” Charlie said, whipping out his tomahawk and crushing the skull of a grey zombie that was coming around one of the cars. We didn’t have time to do anything but start killing because they were instantly on us.

“Use the cars, funnel them!” I shouted, moving over to the left.  I had about ten feet between the car and the fence, and two Z’s were coming right for me.  A quick glance over my shoulder showed me that Charlie had taken the right side, while the four scouts covered the middle which was the largest open space, being about twenty feet wide.

We didn’t use our firearms as a general rule since we didn’t want the report to echo out and cause more zombies to come our way.  Plus, bullets were not reusable, so we had to be careful to make sure they were only in emergency situations, like the threat of being overrun. We weren’t at the point of counting out rounds, and I hoped we never would be, but it was always in the back of my mind.

I faced my first one, a short male of indeterminate age. His shirt was half off his torso, and he sported a single bite on his neck. His eyes were huge, like he died surprised, and they stuck that way. 

I closed his eyes with a single swing of my pick, and damned if I didn’t think about Sarah’s zombie walk discussion. I pushed him out of the way to slow down a faster ghoul that slid along the side of the car. She caught a back handed swing to her temple, and dropped for good by the wheel well.

The next three were going to be a challenge, and I was about to draw my pistol when one of the zombies suddenly fell to the ground. An arrow stuck out of its head, and I spared a glance upwards to the archer standing on the roof of the ticket building. He gave me a thumbs up, which I didn’t return since the other two were nearly on me. I hooked the one on the left and pushed him into the one on the right, holding them both against the car with my pick. Black teeth snapped at my hand, and they missed me by inches. I pulled my knife with my left hand and stabbed the left one in the eye, killing him. The right one pushed back, and I gave him the same treatment.

I turned back to the fight, and a zombie plowed right into me. I dropped my pick and knife and pushed back, trying to keep the teeth from connecting. It was a young female, and she must have been into working out because she was unbelievably strong. My leverage was bad, and her teeth kept getting closer and closer to my neck. I didn’t want to put my hands up any higher, because she’d bite those.  I spun around, using the inertia to gain a little distance, and got my hand on her neck. She looked down and tried to work her teeth into my hand, but I was angry now. Another zombie was coming up, and I kicked him in the hip to get him away while I dealt with his girlfriend. I had the leverage, and I twisted again, slamming her head into the wall. Once, twice, and the third time was the charm as her head cracked. I dropped her when I felt her grip loosen and went back to my other zombies.

The one I had kicked was getting up, and another was working his way along the wall. Another arrow killed the first one, and that gave me time to get my pick and bury it in the skull of the Z by the wall.

I leaned against the wall and caught my breath. Anyone that tells you combat is easy is either a liar or has never done it. I looked over at the rest of the crew, and we were all in a state of catching our breath. Several zombies were dead by arrows, and I made a mental note to look into that for the army. Reusable weapons were not a bad idea.  Charlie was leaning on the wall on his side, his tomahawks held loosely in his hands.  The four scouts were leaning on the cars, having amassed a pile of corpses in between them.

“All clear?” I asked, picking up my knife.

“All clear,” came the response.

I waved at the archer on the rooftop. “My thanks!” I called.

“Anytime, mi’lord!” the man called back. He grinned like a loon and then dropped out of sight.

We burned our weapons free of the zombie gunk, and drove back to the camp. I had a few words for the scouts, and then we informed the rest of the camp about the fair. For a lot of people it was a welcome distraction, and a steady stream of cars and trucks headed south. Everyone was warned we were still in zombie country as Sarah reminded me when she found out how close of a fight I just had.

As the sun set, my mind turned north and to the other part of the army that was moving through cold country. It was late November, and they should be able to clear out that territory quickly. With luck, they would be able to make it to Denver at the right time. We had our own work to do, and since we were heading south, it was going to get worse for us before it got better.

Three days after we found the Faire, Sarah joined the scouting party that was headed south. We were still in open country, but we needed to get moving. The rest we had was what a lot of people needed to feel alive again, and with December somewhere ahead of us, we still had a lot of work to do and a lot of ground to cover if we were going to use the winter to full advantage.

Tulsa, OK

“Okay. I am officially freaked out.”

“Coming from you, that’s actually frightening.”

“I’m serious. There is just something wrong here.”

“What was your first clue? The fact that there’s supposed to be a few hundred thousand zombies here, and we’ve seen none of them? The fact that the ones we’ve seen have been, how shall I say it, shy? Or the fact that since it’s been warmer than usual, there should be a lot of activity, but we’ve seen none?”

“I’m freaked out because Tucker wouldn’t leave the back of the trailer. He took one sniff of the air, poofed out his tail, and ran.”

“Now I’m freaked out.”

“Would you two shut up already?” I said, trying to look around a corner. “I thought I heard something.”

We’d cleared out Arkansas and then waited three weeks while another two thousand fighters went through Louisiana. That actually turned out to be an interesting run.  Some smart gents on the north side of Mississippi River got it in their heads to open the dikes along the banks, and the resulting floods had pushed  the dead in the city of New Orleans out to sea.  What was left didn’t take too much work, and the state was cleared without much incident. I’d heard the rumor of the floating cities out in the gulf where people had taken refuge on the oil platforms, but I didn’t have much interest in bothering them.

Sarah and the boys had gone back to Starved Rock after we had celebrated an early Christmas. We had received word that Tommy’s wife Angela and their child were not feeling well, so Sarah and Rebecca made the trip back with Janna and Kayla. They were going to meet us out in the plains again once winter was over. By that time I hoped to be on the other side of Texas, but who knew? We were maintaining our army by picking up recruits, and we were repopulating several cleared areas.

Right now I was in downtown Tulsa, and it was dead.  We’d seen dozens of places like this, and the story was all the same. Thousands of cars abandoned in the streets, bodies and skeletons all over the place. After you see a few hundred of these places, you start to read the details, and the story begins to unfold. The place where there are few cars but lots of bloodstains is typically a health center or hospital, ground zero for the rising of the dead. From there, you’ll see the traffic start to pile up as people stopped to look at the disaster unfolding before them.  You’ll see lots of cars broken into, and in many cases the interiors will be black with blood and gore.  The worst ones are the vehicles that have bloody car seats in them where children were helpless as dead hands reached to tear them apart. The carnage and destruction will spread out in a circular pattern from there, and inside homes you’ll see blood and destruction starting from the bedrooms on out as sick loved ones turned on their families.

The piles of corpses and broken barricades will let you know where someone made a stand, where the zombies were fought off until the ammo ran out, the barricades were overrun, or the people managed to flee once they had no other option.  Sometimes you’d see a couple of corpses with wounds that were definitely self-inflicted.

Farther out from the epicenter you’ll find the occasional zombie drifting around. They’ve killed everything worth killing within a three-mile radius of when it all fell apart. Crowds will be even further, and then you’ll have the drifting hordes that have nothing else to do but travel from town to town, finishing off anything that didn’t die at first.

In a weird kind of irony, if everyone had just stayed home during the first two weeks of the sickness, it likely would have been contained. If the government had been honest and not tried to set up state centers, more would have survived.

Sometimes, though, the zombies didn’t follow the regular patterns. Sometimes they just stayed in a certain location and did not wander off into the countryside. Sometimes they hit a barricade and turned around. That was what kept a lot of zombies inside cities.  

I looked around the corner and checked the street. There was a line of rusting cars from here to the end of the block. Most of them had been abandoned, although some had been broken into. From where I was, I could see most of them were not occupied, but there were a few I wasn’t sure of.

I waited a minute while the wind stirred a bunch of papers and leaves. Nothing came out of the buildings to investigate the noise, so I ruled out the option of fresh zombies. The older ones had learned to ignore minor rustlings here and there, and we would find a lot of them inside, waiting to attack when something walked by. One of our groups used a dog to go to each doorway and bark. They caught a lot of lurking Z’s that way.

I looked back at my yapping companions, and I figured I had good claim on canine help myself.

“I’m going to head down the left side; Tommy, you take the middle, and Duncan, you’re on the right,” I said.

“How come I always go on the right?” Duncan whined.

“Because I freaking
said
so!” I snapped. “Now go find some zombies before I send you to your room!” I said, smiling.

Tommy opened his mouth, but I cut him off.

“You looking for a time out, mister?” I said, pointing at his face.

Tommy dropped his head and stamped his feet as he made his way to the center of the street.

“You’re ruining my life!” Tommy said, grinning as he pulled out his new melee weapon. The blacksmith at the Renaissance Faire had been busy, updating and improving some of our inventory for killing zombies. He still had his long handled axe, but now he had a new weapon that was a long wooden handle topped with three metal bands. Each band had four metal spikes pointing in the four directions. The spikes were staggered in a spiral, so no matter how it was swung, something was going to get pierced. Use against a living person, and that thing would cripple you wherever it struck

The blacksmith wanted to upgrade my pickaxe, but I was so used to it I just couldn’t think to alter it. It wasn’t broke, so I wasn’t going to fix it.

Duncan had played with the swords, but he was still on the fence on how well they would work. I knew he would eventually get one just because it was different, but it would likely be later when he could practice first.

We walked down 6
th
street, passing by shops and offices. Most of the buildings weren’t too tall, likely because of the tornados that this city saw on a regular basis. There was a small park that was overgrown with grass and weeds to our right, but we still weren’t seeing the enemy.

Tommy held up a hand. Duncan and I immediately stopped and brought up our weapons.

“Did you hear that?” Tommy asked.

“Hear what?” I asked back.

“Sounded like a zombie groan,” he said.

I shook my head and looked over at Duncan. He shrugged and shook his head.

We kept working our way down the street and turned left down South Boston Avenue. The buildings got a little taller, and the view was much more narrow, but the tallest building was only about thirty stories high. There were a lot more dead people lying around and a lot more damage to buildings and storefronts.  Several cars had been driven into stores, and their drivers were still in them.

Tommy stepped on a manhole cover and immediately there was some sort of noise. He looked over at me as if to say he told me so, when Duncan jumped in.

“Sounded like an echo to me,” he said.

“What would you know about anything?” Tommy asked. “You’re wrong ten times a day before breakfast, everyone knows that.

“You wish you were only that successful,” Duncan retorted.

I raised a hand. “Question.”

“Yes?” The two of them looked at me like innocent babes at Christmas.

“Do you think the zombies are in the buildings?”

“No, we’d have seen something by now,” Duncan said, taking a quick look over his shoulder into the store.

“What about the countryside?” I asked.

“Same answer,” said Tommy.

“Tell me what’s left,” I asked.

They thought for a minute. In the silence there was another groan, faint, like it was far away, but it seemed right next to us.

Tommy looked down. “You don’t think…”

Duncan looked at me and I shrugged. “I’ve never been to Tulsa before. Do

they have a subway system?”

“Not that I know of. Sewers?” Duncan asked.

“Could be. Might be an opportunity here,” I said. “If we could get to where the entrance is, bottle it up, we could just stand by and let them walk out single file to get killed,” I said.

The groan underneath us was suddenly amplified by several more groans. We walked a little further on, stepping around a lot of debris, broken glass, and scattered bones. Some of the bones weren’t human, and several were the bones of loyal dogs that tried to defend their masters.

“Where do you think the entrance is?” Tommy asked, tapping on a manhole cover as he passed it by.

Duncan shrugged. “Offhand, I’d say somewhere under that building up there,” he said, pointing to a tall building about two blocks away.

The building looked like it had been built in the nineteen thirties, with a lot of decorative masonry and stonework.  It was a good-sized building, about twenty-five stories tall, with a rich green roof. On the ground floor, there looked to have been a  bank and a restaurant of some sort. There was also about a thousand zombies literally pouring out of the front entrance.  They were moving slowly, thanks to the cold air of December, but they were moving with the same level of determination as a nice warm zombie in the middle of Georgia in August.

“Holy…” Tommy started, but never finished.

“This way!” I yelled, glancing over my shoulder to make sure the two men were behind me. We turned a corner and ran away from the sudden avalanche of dead people, wanting to make sure we put as much distance between us as we could.  Four blocks later, we all put on the brakes as another building vomited ghouls in our direction.

“Dammit! We’re running out of directions,” Tommy said.

“Come on, this way!” Duncan said. He ran towards the horde, with us on his heels, and then quickly turned down an alleyway.  Tommy and I followed, chased by the groans and moans of the hordes spilling out of the ground like Hell had spat them back.

We turned left, then right, then another right, and finally skidded to a stop out into another street. 

We had a second to turn around since the first horde had reached our first point of contact, and Duncan had unerringly led us right back to them.

“Nice orienteering, knucklehead,” Tommy said as he ran past Duncan.

“How was I supposed to know they were going to be there already?” Duncan protested.

“We can argue later, let’s just get the hell out of here,” I said.

“How about up?” Tommy said. “We can lose them that way.”

“For how long?  They’re out of their lair and know we’re around here somewhere. They’ll drift for weeks,” Duncan said.

“Let’s get inside and see if we can avoid them on the ground floor and then try to slip past.  There has to be an end to them and we can get around them. If they’re chasing us then it won’t matter too much, “I said. I went to the nearest door and shrugged off my backpack. Pulling out my little crowbar, I went to work on the door.

The stupid thing was rusty and took a lot longer than it should have. Duncan was practically dancing, and Tommy was nervously glancing up and down the alley. I could hear the ghouls moaning somewhere behind me, and in the confines of downtown Tulsa, the tall buildings created an echoing effect that was somewhat distracting.

“Come on, John. How long are you going to play with that door?” Duncan asked.

“Any help would be nice,” I replied, forgoing the quiet protocol and jamming my crowbar into the space between the door and the frame.

“How hard can it be?” Duncan asked, pulling out his own crowbar. He jammed the flat end into the same space and gave a huge pull that achieved exactly nothing.

I gave him a look. “Pretty dammed hard, I’d say, wouldn’t you?”

“Hang on, pull your end again.  Okay, I see what the problem is.” Duncan placed his crowbar a little more strategically. “Pull your end a little more, and hold it…here!”

The door finally cracked open, and since Tommy was the one holding his rifle he ducked in first, leading with his weapon light. We closed the door behind us and tried to find something to block it with, but there wasn’t anything nearby. We weren’t going to be sticking around long, so we just kept moving.

“Where are we?” Duncan asked.

“No idea,” I said. “It just seemed like a good place to get out of the street.”

“I think I see a way to the main area,” Tommy said. “Follow me.”

Tommy wound his way through several offices and storerooms, staying on a path through the small maze.  We passed a kitchen, a Laundromat, and a custodian closet. Finally, we stepped through an access door to a large, decorated foyer.  It looked like a huge hotel but without the front desk.  There was a café across the way, a men’s clothing shop, a newsstand, and two very large escalators going up to the second and possibly third floors.  Along the back wall was a large bank of elevators. Above each one was a listing of the floors that particular elevator once reached.