“We’re running low on fuel and ammunition,” I told them. After the dishes were done, Felix and I joined everyone else, who had hardly moved from under the trees and were collectively watching the sun set.
“We’ve still got a few hundred gallons of regular gasoline, but we’re desperately short of diesel.”
Michael sat up. “Wait, did you say a
few hundred
gallons?” I nodded. “Holy shit, that’s a lot of gas.”
“Not as much as you’d think,” I replied. “We’ll need more, and we need diesel.”
“What have you got in mind?” Sue asked.
“We’ve found a place with fuel, but it’s in downtown Nashville. I’m sure you guys are well aware that anywhere you go in that area, you’re liable to run into a horde of zombies lurking around any given corner.”
“I know exactly where you’re talking about,” Felix said, “over by the Titan’s stadium, right?”
I nodded. “We’ve done it before, but it’s risky, and in case you guys haven’t noticed, these zombies are changing, they’re getting smarter.”
Felix and his friends looked at each other. “Yeah, we got attacked one night,” Felix said as he pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “They bit a couple of our friends. We had to kill them.”
“Yeah, we’ve had something similar happen to us,” I responded. “I made up a rule about it.”
Michael chuckled and pointed at me. “You’re the one who spray painted those rules all over town.”
“Yeah,” I replied with a frown. “I thought I was doing something important at the time, but I’m not sure if many of them apply anymore though, except maybe the last one.” I was also thinking about what he said. He was aware of the rules I had spray painted, so that meant Felix was aware of them. Maybe I was stretching it, but I thought Felix of all people would have immediately known who the initial Z stood for.
I saw them looking at each other, like they couldn’t remember any of the rules. I laughed, on the inside anyway. There were only two other people who had memorized them; Julie and the Captain, and I wasn’t sure Julie even knew them anymore.
“Rule fourteen: They’re Evolving.”
Michael snapped his fingers. “Ah.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, anyway, their behavior used to be entirely predictable, so it was pretty easy to work around it.”
“Not anymore though,” Terry said. “They’re doing some pretty scary shit lately. Anything you try with small numbers these days is pretty risky.”
“We’ve agreed it’s much safer if we go only in large numbers,” I added.
“Yeah,” Julie chimed in, “we had this problem with one particular member of our group who occasionally gets a bad case of Rambo on the brain.”
I grimaced. Here it comes, I thought. She continued.
“Yeah, he’d go out by himself dressed up in his raggedy sniper outfit and hunt zombies like he was on a personal quest to rid the world of them.”
I hastened a glance at everyone. Terry and Andie were smirking. Fred was looking at me with his patented arched eyebrow, like he was saying ‘I told you so.’
“Who was crazy enough to hunt those things by themselves?” Sue asked, and then she saw everyone looking at me. “Oh,” she said. Terry started chuckling.
“In my defense, I thought it was the right thing to do at the time,” I retorted.
“Bullshit,” Julie counter-retorted. She was right, I knew it and she knew I knew it. I wasn’t going to win and decided to change the subject.
“Well, anyway, with the four of you working with us, we should have no problem getting back to business. Strength in numbers, right?”
“I’m afraid we can’t help much, Zach,” Felix said. “We only have around a dozen rounds of ammo left,” Michael looked at him harshly. It was obvious he did not want that information shared. Felix caught the look.
“It’s okay, guys, we can trust Zach.” He continued to get stared down by Michael. Felix, feeling chastened, looked down at his hands.
“Alright,” I said, “ammo is the number one priority. You guys can help us raid the National Guard first.”
“We’ve tried it already,” Felix said, “but the armory is built like a bank vault.”
“We’ve got to try,” Andie said. There were some murmurs of agreement.
“I know where the keys are,” Janet said quietly. She looked up to see everyone staring at her intently. She had been morose since Julie’s talk. I was hoping God had answered my prayers and the bitch was never going to speak again, but what she just said had my undivided attention.
“I mean, back when Tommy and I lived there, I knew where the keys were kept. I’ve no idea if they’re still there.”
I caught Julie looking at me. She winked. I was going to have to get the scoop on her little talk she had with mommy dearest, but at a later time.
“Well, I believe you’re going to be worth having around after all,” I said. Janet looked at me with cold, appraising eyes.
“It’s settled then,” I said and looked at Terry. “The Corporal is going to put together a mission plan. We’ve got quite a few farm chores to catch up on first, but I’d say we should be ready to do it in a couple of days. Everyone okay with it?”
Julie murmured in contentment as I massaged her back. She had to lie on her side, which made it a little difficult, but I managed to evoke more than one sound of pleasure.
“That must have been some lecture you had with your mother, it seemed to have had a positive effect,” I commented. Julie chortled.
“I made it plain that she was going to have to change. She didn’t like what I had to say, said I had a bad attitude, and blamed you for brainwashing me.”
I snorted and continued massaging. She cooed some more. I think I found her weakness.
“Anyway, I think I got my point across. She could have kept her mouth shut about the keys, so maybe she’s coming around.”
“I hope so,” I responded.
“You hate her, don’t you?”
I carefully thought of my answer before responding. “I don’t care too much for her, but I don’t hate her, even though she planned on killing me once.”
Julie didn’t answer and after a minute, I realized she had fallen asleep. I kept massaging her back until I drifted off too.
Fred opted out of our mission. Even though he didn’t say as much, I don’t think he liked Felix and his friends. He definitely didn’t like Janet. I didn’t argue the point.
We located the keys in a lockbox in the commanding officer’s office. I found it a little bit ironic. The keys to unlock the armory were locked in a small metal lockbox. A little work with a cutting torch yielded us easy access to them. Janet led us to the armory, which was a concrete structure with a massive steel door. Even with a healthy shot of WD-40, the locks turned only in great reluctance. The hinges were just as bad. We took turns yanking on the handle before the rusty hinges reluctantly broke free.
“Shit,” I said. The gun racks were totally empty. The only items left were some spare parts. Terry frowned.
“Alright,” he said, “we may or may not be able to use this stuff, but let’s load it up anyway.”
It took us less than five minutes to load up the sparse inventory, and then we made our way to the ammunition magazine. It wasn’t as hard to make entry this time, but we didn’t have much luck there either.
“Well, Corporal, how much?” I asked.
“A grand total of three ammo boxes,” he said. “Two of them are empty, the third one has about five hundred rounds of 7.62,” he opened one of the boxes and inspected the ammunition. “It’s all linked, so that’s a plus.”
I looked in the box. They appeared in good shape with the copper showing only a slight tinge of patina. Every fifth round was orange tipped. I pointed at one and looked at Terry.
“Are those tracer rounds?” I asked. He nodded.
“If only we had some machine guns,” Kelvin lamented. I thought of our M60s and hastened a subtle glance at Terry, who made brief eye contact with me.
“Yeah, well, we’ll take it with us. Maybe it’ll be a good barter item,” he said innocently.
We were suddenly alerted by a poor imitation of an owl call coming from outside. It was Felix. Andie snickered as we hurried out.
“We’ve got zed company,” he said excitedly. I looked to where he was pointing and observed twenty to thirty of them, slowly walking down Sidco.
“It looks like it’s a bust here,” I said, “let’s head out.”
“You’re not going to kill them?” Janet asked with an edge of contempt in her voice. “There’s only a few dozen.” I shook my head while she stared at me in disbelief.
“Only a few dozen we see,” I countered. “When we start shooting, we’re liable to have twice as many in no time.” I looked around. “Ammo is tight right now, no need wasting it when we don’t have to.”
“Yeah,” Michael added, “unless you guys got plenty to spare, I’d rather not engage them. Let’s load up and get the hell out of here.”
Everyone agreed and we exited onto Sidco in the opposite direction from where the zombies were coming from. Suddenly, Andie pointed.
“Look,” she said. She was pointing in the direction of the motor pool. “I see portable tankers.”
“Yeah,” Terry replied, “but the military uses mo-gas. We might be able to flush one out and use it for our needs.” He grabbed the radio microphone and raised Michael in the truck behind us.
“Do you guys see those tankers over on the left?” he asked. Michael acknowledged. “We can come back for them when we don’t have tankers already in tow. Y’all are going to need one or two of them if you’re going to settle down in our neck of the woods.”
We waited for some kind of comment about it, but they changed the subject.
“Where to next,” he asked, “the fuel reservoir?”
I nodded. “Yep, we’re going to take Franklin Road downtown, it’s the shortest route and there aren’t very many obstacles.”
Franklin Pike was four lanes wide, so it was an easy ride, but as we drove through the Melrose community and into downtown Nashville, we encountered another horde. Andie stopped the truck and scoffed in disgust.
“Shit, where are they all coming from?” she asked nobody in particular. I grabbed the microphone.
“Alright, there are about ten to fifteen of them up ahead, blocking the roadway. We’re going to drive through them. Go slow and there’s less chance of them getting hung up under the wheels. Hold your fire unless you have no other choice.”
“Roger that, Zach,” Felix responded. Andie closed the distance and then slowed to a crawl. Our makeshift triangular shape bumper did a mostly successful job of pushing them out of the way, only a couple of them fell directly beneath the truck, but they didn’t get hung up. It only took a minute for both vehicles to bust through the line and then we increased our speed.
“I hope that’s the only group we run into,” Felix said over the radio. I swapped a look with Terry. We both hoped he was right. He was wrong.
We kept running into group after group. Ultimately, we ended up having to fire several times, maybe forty or fifty precious rounds. It took us almost an hour to cover less than six miles, but we stopped suddenly at Broadway and Fourth Avenue.
“Holy shit,” Andie exclaimed. I groaned in agreement.
Everyone got out of the vehicles and gathered around.
“This is bad, isn’t it, Zach?” Felix said.
“What do we do now?” Michael asked.
“We go home.” I said belatedly.
Yesterday, we conducted a mission with our new friends, or should I say Zach’s new friends. Their names are Felix (Zach’s best friend from high school), Michael, Kelvin, and Sue. They’re all from Nashville. Zach seems to think very highly of Felix. Quite frankly, I don’t trust any of them. Neither does Fred. There’s something in the way they look at us and our stuff that sets off warning bells with me. When Zach showed them the new root cellar we recently built, they looked at the shelves filled with fresh vegetables and mason jars with the look of at least one of those deadly sins my grandmother always preached about.
The results of the mission: We busted at the National Guard Barracks. No guns and only five hundred rounds of 7.62 ammo, but it got worse. We made our way toward the fuel reservoirs only to be stopped by water. Yeah, water. Downtown Nashville was flooded. Zach believes the Wolf Creek dam finally gave way. He said the dam held back almost two trillion gallons of water. I’m not sure how he knew that, but it’s a shit load of water.
So, the bottom line: no more fuel from the reservoir. Hell, most of downtown Nashville for that matter, everything within a couple of hundred yards from the Cumberland River is now under water. Zach said the water level will eventually return to normal, maybe in a year, but in the meantime…
There’s more bad news. The place out on River Road that Konya told us about, Zach said they would have been flooded out as well. So, if there are any survivors, they’ve been displaced and may be a potential problem for us.
Everyone was quiet on the ride back. Quiet and dejected. It didn’t help that Chet’s fucktard friends were waiting for us when we arrived home and had the nerve to say we should share the gas with them. Zach tried to be polite and tell them what went wrong. One of them actually walked over and looked into our empty tanker. Zach and Terry finally had enough. They ordered them to leave and not come back. They weren’t happy, but they’re no match for us and they knew it. I think we should’ve killed them. I know their type. They’re going to do something sneaky one day.
Okay, enough about them. Our status is as follows: We have plenty of food and barring any unforeseen disasters, we’re going to be fine in that department. Our livestock population is good. Bo has given us more horses, we now have six. He said if we prove we can take care of them, he’ll give us more.
Our supply of fuel will last us through the winter, if we don’t share it with anyone, but then we’re going to be in a pickle. Zach says all of the existing fuel out there is nearing the end of its shelf life anyway, so we need to adjust. It seems like this is the last thing we have from normal times, and even it is slipping away from us.
Our stock of ammunition is tight. Zach said we are completely out of primers, which prevents us from reloading. All of the gun stores we’ve previously visited have been completely looted, so we’re going to have to go house to house, looking for ammo and reloading products.
Julie and Penny’s pregnancies are progressing as well as can be expected. I don’t know of anyone else who is pregnant, I’m certainly not. - Andie