The Zombie Letters (18 page)

              Alvin still had no idea how he made it out of the city in one piece. When he reached the cliffs, there seemed to be no sign of the horrible things that now inhabited the city. None of them chased the van. Perhaps, he assumed, they had some form of intelligence. The food supply was better in the city. Either that or those fucking monsters down there were too hungry to climb the steep cliff to the house. Alvin ditched the van at the bottom of the cliff and climbed a small, twisty path on foot. Now, overlooking the decimated city below his feet, Alvin French’s mind wandered. He let it drift into the sky all around him. There was no destination anymore. No meeting to attend. Nowhere to go. Just look for a place to refuel and sleep. Then . . . back to the sky. If that was going to be his life until either someone saved his beloved city or these dead people starved themselves to death, then so be it.

              Private airports litter the country. Small landing strips and tiny community airports were everywhere. The ones on the edges of towns and ones on National Guard military bases had small restaurants and cafeterias, pilot bars and vending machines that had actual
food
in them. The ones in the Midwest were walled-off with ten-foot high concrete walls. National Guard ones were ideal. They had some pretty amazing security gates. Small airports are natural fortresses. Nothing is gettin
g
in.
For the zombies or whatever the hell they were, airports were not good food-sources. Even to the living. They wouldn’t waste their time there unless someone went full retard and wanted to make a hell of a lot of noise. There are a lot of farmer’s fields in Midwestern states and at night, hungry pilots and lot lizards would go out to the fields and steal the crops. Happened all the time; all the way up into the latter nineties when small and private airports finally got some goddamn funding from Uncle Sam. Frenchie was too young to remember this, but his father talked about it from time to time. He said that back then, in the space of one season, an acre of fucking corn would be cleared. The only way in and out of the airports was with a bag or shirt-f of corn, soybeans or tobacco. That doesn’t happen anymore, even though the airports are still in the middle of nowhere. Alvin could find them all blindfolded. The best part about them? Alvin could detonate a mile-wide perimeter of Claymores and the zeds near the city wouldn’t hear a thing. He knew better to stay more than a day in one, though. No more than two at the max. Staying in one place with the way things were now was just begging to make yourself dead.

              The only safe place now is the sky.

PART III

THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY

CHAPTER 8

I

             
H
e always travelled by bike. That was the way to do it for sure. Bicycles are silent and able to effectively outrun a person if shit goes to shit. It was always best to travel during the day. There was a common misconception that being out and about at night was the best way. At night, all you get is obscured vision, confused senses and disorientation no matter
how
good you know your surroundings. Power grids . . . whole plants . . . didn’t work anymore. There was no one around to operate them. Forget generators. They make too much noise. Dennis Jackson had one of those silent outdoor ones installed a long time ago, but even though his home was nearly impassable by foot, stragglers made their way in from time to time. One or two of those things . . . maybe even ten were no problem to dispatch. A whole group of them could navigate his secluded home in Kentucky’s Barlow Bottoms with relative ease. Dennis was always a survivalist. Expensive hobby . . . but then again, he had electricity. The electricity was only used on bright days, however. The generator had a bit of a hum to it.

              Today was one of the now frequent trips to town. Dennis hated going out even when he
had
to, but the family needed a few things. A few days ago, the married man of two broke the head off of his axe while chopping wood for the evening fire. That axe came in handy. It came in
too
handy for a trip into town to wait. It had been ten months since the invasion started. Dennis looked down at his watch. JUN 13 2016. Man . . . even ten months ago seemed like a lifetime away now. The past hadn’t slipped into history. It was executed. Mayfield, Kentucky was a wasteland now. Every day, more and more of those monsters he didn’t recognize were wandering the streets. They were ravenous, half-starved and deadly. They had laid claim to the earth while mankind was careless. Someone
had
to have been careless. Somehow, in some place, a test tube was dropped or a diseased animal bit someone. Whatever it was, it was man who turned his back. Seizing the moment, these things crept out of fate’s back door.

              Dennis was in town the previous weekend, poking through a now-deserted sporting goods store for a new machete and face-mask. The outbreak happened so quickly in Kentucky that most of the stores hadn’t even been looted, which made everything so much more accessible. Dennis knew there were survivors in Mayfield unseen and unheard. There were still evidences of them everywhere. A window was broken where one was intact just a couple days before. A coffee machine that he had planned to take back home was yanked from the shelf at Walgreens; along with hand towels and toothbrushes. A lot of the winter jackets and shoes had been hoarded by someone at the larger clothing stores in the area. That was understandable, though. While hunting for the machete that day, Dennis walked outside to sharpen it. They were always so dull when they came out of the store. There is only one way to sharpen a knife. Use a car window. The outside edge of a car window is actually an abrasive . . . far more effective than any whetstone. It didn’t take as long to bring a razor edge to a blade, either. Twenty strokes and the machete went from butter-knife to Ginsu. He’d been working on the machete slowly and always with the mask on. Military-issued gas mask. He’d seen too many people try to take down one of those terrible monsters, only to get blood all over their faces. Bad news after that. So . . . the stuffy gas mask was a necessary evil. The thing was one uncomfortable pain in the ass, but it kept him living.

              Today was a quick trip. In and out. There was a National Guard base that had been used as a makeshift FEMA shelter right after the invasion broke out. It wasn’t a shelter anymore. Dennis had cruised by there recently and had to return to get a few more MRE’s and a new axe. MRE’s . . . the Army’s yardstick of civilization. The acronym stands for Meals Ready to Eat. Dennis didn’t need them for the food, though. MRE’s have little pouches of the main meal, a packet of peanut butter, crackers, pepper, chewing gum, towelettes and a single-use wad of toilet paper. There was an appetizer in there too . . . usually beans or rice. The food was typical of sustenance packed astronaut-style. It kept a good soldier alive and that was it. No one considers an MRE fine cuisine by any stretch of even the wildest imagination. As an avid survivalist, Dennis didn’t use them for the food at all. Inside the MRE pack is a flameless heater . . . a little pouch that chemically heats the food inside. No soldier deserves a cold meal. The idea behind chemical flameless heaters is the oxidation of metal to generate heat. Magnesium dust is mixed with salt and a little iron dust and spread on a thin, flexible pad about the size of a playing card. To activate the heater, the good soldier just adds a little water. The metal quickly oxidizes and brings the water to a boil; expelling massive amounts of steam in the process.

              Back in the Gulf War, American soldiers found a remarkable use for the flameless food heaters when they were in a pinch. A POW invented it. What he discovered was that a soldier could take a canteen – a very thick plastic bottle with an airtight lid and fill the canteen three-quarters full with water. Good soldier could then place an MRE heating pad in the canteen, along with bits of metal, bolts, rocks and pieces of shrapnel lying around. If the airtight lid was screwed on tight enough, the gasses of the chemical heater would expand the canteen and inflate it like a balloon . . . effectively making a pretty powerful shrapnel grenade. The canteens would be under so much pressure that the thick plastic bottle would explode, killing every single thing unlucky enough to be within eyeshot of it. Dennis knew great tricks like that. Loading a Ricky-Bomb, as the Gulf War vets called it, with Tabasco sauce along with the water was effective as well. Zombies couldn’t be killed by anything other than incineration or decapitation, but Ricky-Bombs were powerful enough to blow arms and legs off. The Tabasco ones did that and added the bonus of blinding anything with eyes exposed to the blast. The little heater pad, having nowhere to go, dissolves and releases the metal shavings into the sauce. Although temporary, it was a great way to make a good and effective field explosive. They were a last-resort thing and never to be used in town. At home, it was fine. One Ricky-Bomb could cake a handful of zeds. Three could take out a tree stump. Five would capsize a two-story house.

              Explosives were for home use back in the bottoms. Dennis Jackson could shoot a tanker truck with a rocket launcher and no one would hear it past the bottoms. The largest number of stragglers he’d seen in one area near the house numbered ten. Ten was enough. One Ricky-Bomb took out or incapacitated all but two of them. The other two were blind enough to decapitate quickly.

              And come to think . . . he always hated Tabasco sauce.

              Dennis removed the chain mail and leather armguards from his lower arms and grabbed twenty or so MRE’s from the storage lockers. Not much would fit into the bike’s basket, but there would be enough room on the back to strap the axe. Armguards were important. To take the head of an infected person, one needed to be pretty damn close. About ninety percent of the time, people were bitten on the forearm, the shoulder or the lower leg. Dennis took thick straps of leather, originally armguards used for archery. He had sewn them together to sleeve both his arms and lower legs with them. The other part was made up of chain mail he found that had been used in anti-shark suits. One of the community college museums had two full shark suits on display. With the gas mask, there was enough mobility to get around and move quickly, but the makeshift guards brought him a little further peace of mind.

              He cleaned out the barracks with little problem. Twelve MRE’s, two canteens and a pair of boots about his size. Placing the items into the small basket at the front of the bike, Dennis took a moment to survey the world before him. Even on the outskirts of little towns like this, the world was wasted. The dead humans were living again and the world itself had died. Cobwebs nestled themselves high in trees and in the corners of every man-made structure everywhere. It was as if even the spiders had escaped to somewhere else. Upended, burned and destroyed vehicles were everywhere. Bullet holes dotted the pavements. Crops had stopped being tended to and weedish overgrowth had taken over. Everything everywhere had the thickest layer of dust and the air had a smell to it. The earth smelled like a home that no one lived in anymore.

              Dennis Jackson’s brother was a National Guardsman and Dennis himself was an Eagle Scout and an expert in wilderness survival. On top of what he studied on his own time, he rarely wondered why he had survived as long as he had. There are just some things that people don’t realize could help them. Before the invasion, he often assisted the Boy Scout troops all over the state. Even went to the white house once. How pitifully ironic how much use that had now. So much of his knowledge came in handy that it made him feel sick. His wife Amanda enjoyed teaching their son Ryan the ways of wilderness survival. The baby would learn in time, if he wanted to. Well . . . he kind of
had
to now. Ryan wasn’t a bad
B
oy
Scout either. Even at eight years old. He was a true prodigy that one day would outdo his father with a little guidance. The kid always had a level head. Even during this. Amanda always joked that they could drop him off in the middle of a desert and he would return days later, not only alive and well, but with a car he built himself. Funny. Dennis’ dad was an Eagle Scout too. To get little Dennis interested in it at a young age, Father would train him to fight zombies. They had this game Dad called ‘apocalypse.’ It took the edge off of things in a child’s mind . . . things with great mental weight. In his later years, Dennis and his dad still enjoyed playing it. They graduated from foam swords and NERF guns to paint grenades and real firearm training. Ryan was taught the same way . . . how to fire a gun, how to fortify a house, where to find clean water, how to trap and prepare food, how to make a fire and how to navigate without the aid of a compass.