Authors: J.A. Crowley
Back upstairs, I checked each room. The kitchen was full of the dead. They had broken through the plywood over the slider and gotten in. Mary was under the pile, clearly dead, holding an empty .22 pistol in one hand. She was pretty well chewed up. She had apparently used her last bullet to take her own life.
Mom and Eddie were at the base of the stairs. Eddie was alive but had been mauled and was about to die. I didn’t want him to turn so I ended him with my .45.
Like Mary, Mom had ended herself. She was covered with gashes and bites. She was surrounded by dead zombies and had certainly gone out fighting. I was heartbroken that I lost both Dad and Mom to such horrible and violent deaths in a few days. I was living a nightmare.
The stairway was choked with bodies. I dreaded what I would find at the top. Kate. I climbed up, calling out as I went. The entire second floor was covered in blood, guts and bodies.
I finally heard Kate calling but couldn’t tell where she was. I checked the attic stairs and the sound was louder up there so I carefully climbed up, again stepping on bodies as I went. The attic was full of live zombies! I quickly took them down with the M4. I counted 20 before I ran out of ammo, then began dealing with my crowbar. Soon enough, I was alone.
I heard another sound. It was Kate. She had crawled behind the air handler for the central air system and barricaded herself in. She was cut to ribbons because she had to enter through a tiny gap. None of the zombies could get at her. She’d had to lay there in a pool of her own blood and wait for rescue—or death. She was sobbing, and asking again and again about the kids. I told her they seemed okay but everyone needed to be checked out carefully.
I grabbed my tool kit and started dismantling the air handler. It took about an hour to take it apart enough to get Kate out. We talked while I worked, but I could tell Kate was getting weaker and weaker. Finally, she passed out and I went wild tearing the thing apart to get to her. I gently brought her out and laid her on top of an old desk that we had up there. She was a mess.
I washed up with hand sanitizer as best I could. I poured rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide all over Kate because there was so much virus around. To be honest, I also went through about a gallon of bleach, which I never told her. She was screaming in pain but at least she was alive. I bandaged her wounds with clean rags. I duct taped the larger ones closed to stop the bleeding.
I went downstairs, stripped, gave myself a quick bleach wash, and changed into some clean clothes. I had been so covered in zombie gore that I was afraid to carry Kate until I was clean. I carefully brought her down from the attic.
I called Mike downstairs and gathered everyone together. “We need to move next door to Mom’s house. This place is contaminated and I’m going to burn it down. We have to save what we can and move it over. Until we’ve had time to do that, we’ll all stay together next door. Everyone grab weapons and a few MREs and water. Let’s go.”
That night, we all slept and no one stood watch. We were devastated, exhausted, and depressed. We’d all lost loved ones and it was clear how difficult life was going to be from now on. Maybe we just didn’t care anymore. We got lucky. It was a very quiet night.
In the morning, Kate had improved a bit. Some color had returned to her face and she got some soup and some water down. I decided that I had to do something to truly protect her and the kids. Life wouldn’t be worth living without them. I told her how much I loved her about a hundred times, until she told me to go bother someone else.
The group sat around trying to figure out what had happened. I started with my story. I left out some details about Mariana and Santos; just not ready to get into that yet.
Mike told us that his perch on the attic was safe. He’d had good shots the entire time and had run through all of his ammo. He was so busy shooting that he hadn’t seen too much.
Stan told us what had happened to Wes. “We seemed to have it under control when they just started pouring through the gap. Wes raced down and grabbed the truck. I had to shoot as fast as I could, which only drew more. Wes came screaming down the road, ran over a bunch that just about had me, and slammed the truck into the Civic, sealing the gap. He set the brake and opened his window to yell out to me. One of the fast ones, really fast, jumped into the window and bit him on the face. Wes killed it and a bunch more, and then killed himself. I think he knew I couldn’t do it. I ran back down here and got up in Wes’ perch in the tree. I saw your kids and Tyler walking around out front and brought them up there with me. There were plenty of good spots on the tree and I wanted them safe.”
“When the zombies came, we all did our best. Mike was dropping them left and right. We all were. But there were too many. They got through the fence and filled up the trench. They hit the fence so hard that only three of the Claymores went off. Once they filled up the trench, the rest could walk right over them. They stormed all around the house and garage. All the trenches filled up. I told the kids to stay put and keep shooting and when I saw a gap, I jumped down and ran around back to check on Marj.”
Mike spoke up. “Yeah, I saw you do that. I did my best to cover you. That’s when they attacked the garage. I heard Rich yell and Carol and Jamie were screaming. There was nothing I could do. The garage went fast.”
Marj chimed in. “The back yard was also a weak spot.” She described how her area had been overrun and how getting up high was the key to her survival.
As the stories went on, it became clear that a typical house like mine simply couldn’t be defended against a huge mob. We needed high spots, ladders, deep trenches, fences and walls, and natural barriers to protect us. Assuming that the zombie horde attacks would continue, we needed to find an entirely new spot. It had to have running water, good visibility, and privacy.
To avoid horde attacks, we’d have to continually eradicate zombies over a wide area, and then isolate the area with some type of barriers. To handle hordes if and when they did appear, we needed something like the bridge or a cliff to herd them over. There simply wasn’t enough ammunition to kill them all. We also needed to stay away from highways and roads that we couldn’t block.
So our survival strategy had to include defense, isolation, and eradication. Mike called it the "DIE" plan. Kind of funny, in a way.
We spent the entire day talking and resting. We ate MRE’s and sat around. Around 5:30 in the evening, we heard a noise outside. It was Steve. Bobbie yelled “Steve’s here!” and was about to open the door when Mike told her to stop. He went out with his 9 and, when Steve refused to respond to his greetings, Mike ended him. We knew that he had been infected. It was interesting that he’d found us over here and we needed to consider whether the zombies had some type of residual memory.
That night we set up a watch but it was quiet. The next day we decided to work on a plan to get us through the winter.
It was already September 11 and the winter would be coming soon. We didn’t really have time that day to remember the victims of the cowardly terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. We had our own problems. We did wonder a bit about whose fault this might have been and some did wonder about Muslim terrorists. Pointless, and we knew it.
Stan spoke up: “Forget about that. We need a ‘fort,’ tons of food and water, weapons, and a heat source and we need it soon. It can’t be a regular house. We’re going to have to travel to find the right place.”
We all agreed to move. We needed at least three vehicles. Four wheel drive trucks with four doors would be perfect. We were thinking about how to do that, with all kinds of different schemes, when Kate spoke up from the corner. “Just go to Smitty’s Ford in town. You can take whatever you want. It’s all free now.” She was crying while she said it. It was no good that stuff was free and we’d have gone back to the old ways in a second.
Stan, Christina and I decided to take a trip into town. I figured that town might be okay since the horde was pretty much gone. We loaded up with weapons and water only and took mountain bikes into town.
Our first stop was Smitty’s. It was empty except for two salesmen who had been trapped inside. We took care of them without discussion or thought. We went to the manager’s office and located the keyboard. Then, we shopped the lot. We chose two big black Expeditions and a black F-250 pickup with four doors. All had trailer hitches and were heavy duty vehicles. We found two cargo platforms that mounted on the hitches and installed them on an Expedition and on the pickup. Stan found a plow for the truck and mounted it since the truck was prepped for it. We found a bike rack and mounted that on the other Expedition. We found roof top cargo carriers and mounted one on each Expedition.
We secured Smitty’s, threw the bikes on the rack, and headed next door to Ace Hardware. We quickly cleared the store of its occupants—three former salesmen and the store manager—and scanned the store for supplies. They had done an excellent job of securing the store; the shelves were untouched. I wondered if anyone would have survived if they’d let people in to get stuff they could have used.
We concentrated on true necessities—matches, lighters, gasoline cans, barbed wire, a roll of chain link fence, hand tools, and some screws and nails. They had hand pumps that we could use for gas or water, so we grabbed those. We grabbed three big red tool boxes to use for First Aid boxes. We took jumper cables and hand tools and 3 Honda generators.
We had decided to install wire fencing over the windows of the cars as a safety measure so we did it right there. We covered the windshields with chain link, which we mounted on 2 by 4’s that we screwed to the side posts; that way, the wipers would still work. We covered the large rear windows on the Expeditions with chain link and chicken wire. We screwed pieces of chain link over the rear windows as well. Finally, we did the rest of the windows. We’d thought about leaving them unprotected, for escape, but we figured that we’d be able to still operate the doors to escape.
Stan found a good-sized landscape trailer parked out back. We decided to use it, load it up with as much stuff as we could, and then figure out back at the house if we’d need it. We took the bike rack off and hitched the trailer to an Expedition. Stan drove over to Smitty’s and took 4 spare wheels mounted with tires off an F-250 and put them in the trailer. They’d fit all of the new vehicles.
There was a Radio Shack next door to the Ace. It was empty of people and had been trashed but the storeroom was still locked and full of goodies. Christina and I took CB radios for the cars and a bunch of hand held CBs plus all the batteries we could find. We grabbed Garmin GPS units. We also grabbed a base CB for use at our eventual home. That was it for Radio Shack. They didn’t have any shortwave radios.
It was well past noon so we decided to start heading home. We made one more stop, at a small convenience store, and loaded up all of the bottled water they had. The freezers were still on so we emptied out the ice cream and headed home. On the way, we filled up the gas tanks and the spares. It was weird, because the pumps were still on, and I had to use my credit card. I wasn’t worried about paying the bill, though.
Mike and Jake had been inventorying while we were gone. We decided that for guns, from now on we’d focus on .223 caliber, .22 caliber, .45 handguns and 12 gauge shotguns. We had plenty of ammo for those and we figured it would be easy to find more. Those were popular calibers and it was more convenient to be able to swap ammo and magazines as necessary. We had the 4 Ithacas and the 4 M4s from the Snows and we had plenty of ammo for them. I had the Mini and that was in .223 so that was good. We had a bunch of .22 rifles and my .22 pistol and 2 .45s. I had my 12 gauge as well.
The next morning, Stan went out and found the .50 cal and recovered it and the unused Claymores. He mounted the .50 in the back of the pickup truck and covered it with a tarp. We only had a few cans of ammo for it but figured we could find more. We had about a case of grenades and divided them among the cars.
Mike stowed the rest of the guns in Dad’s basement. Maybe we’d come back and need them, or maybe some other survivors could use them. He loaded them all into a trunk, along with the ammo, all cleaned and oiled and wrapped nicely in rags and plastic bags.
Tyler, Cody and Christina packed all of the food we could carry into the Expeditions and Bobbie and Sean packed cases of MREs into the back of the pickup. Jake mounted ladders on the pickup’s ladder racks and to the side of the pickup. He even ran one across the back on top of the tailgate. They acted as a roof and walls, and we could shoot through them. It was a good setup, and we knew we’d need the ladders later. We packed every other ladder that we could find in the neighborhood in the trailer, along with hand tools, more food and ammo, and a bunch of other junk. We had a total of 4 generators and a bunch of fuel cans as well.
It took the entire day to pack, unpack, and repack until we were pretty well loaded up. Clothes went in the cargo carriers on top. We parked the backhoe in the back yard and generally cleaned up. Finally, we called it a day, went inside, and got some sleep.
The next morning, we shoved off at 5:00 a.m. I went over in the morning and lit my house up. I felt no emotion as I did it. My true home was with my wife and kids, wherever they were.