Authors: Tw Brown
I watched Kevin struggle with the submerged door. It was Steve who came up with the idea to break the metal lip that was helping keep the water in. Greg ran across the street to a big pick-up truck with one of those black storage boxes in the back. A moment later he returned with a splitting wedge and a short-handled sledgehammer.
Of course we knew this would attract attention, but there was just no way Kevin could pry that hatch up with all the standing water. Also, this way, we could go in and offer him back-up if anything nasty came up out of that cellar. It only took Greg six or seven good hits to knock a hole in the frame.
Dark water gushed out onto the street along with an absolutely horrid stench. Perry, Steve, and I all managed to keep from puking only about three seconds longer than Meredith and Greg. All of us could see that, while many of the town’s zombie population had been dealt with by the looters, there were still plenty left.
A couple of hundred were moving in now from every direction. We told Kevin we’d have to hurry as we rushed into the puddle strewn room and helped him with the obviously water-swollen wooden square. A single, recessed metal handle was all he had to grasp, but Greg once more put the wedge to good use.
When the hatch finally gave way what we saw was about four inches of stairwell, and then water. That is until this hideously bloated face popped out. Hands grasped Kevin’s leg before we had managed to all back away. From that point everything happened so fast. Another set of blue, water pruned hands had Kevin’s other leg and had yanked him off his feet. His head thudded hard on the wet wooden floor causing him to just suddenly go limp. Before anybody could grab him he had been pulled halfway into the three-by-four foot opening.
Greg and I grabbed his arms just as more bodies began pushing up, crowding the space with arms, hands, and heads. One of the zombies took a chunk out of Kevin’s leg and he screamed in pain suddenly seeming to shake off the near-unconsciousness from his fall.
It was a hideous tug-of-war. Meredith moved to one side of the opening and brought Greg’s discarded sledge hammer down on the top of the skull of a gray haired lady who had just taken another bite out of Kevin’s right leg. Kevin sat up suddenly, jerking away from Greg’s and my attempts to pull him free. He kicked and set his hands on the lip of the opening to push himself back. That was when two more hands grabbed his right wrist and pulled him into the opening with a splash.
Perry lunged forward, but thankfully Meredith stopped him. A zombie began to rise out of the water just as the sounds of the ones approaching from the outside could be heard.
The last thing I saw before I turned to run with the others was a swirl of darkness that could only be blood spreading across the surface of the frothing water.
We returned to the RVs and decided to head north once we skirted the outside of town. A small private road split these two huge fields and led up to some foothills. We only passed one house that we could see. We had slipped into Ritzville just before sunrise, and with it being full daylight by the time we made it out, we just wanted to find a place to hide.
Nobody is talking much. I dozed off, but woke an hour or so later to find that Meredith and Joey had climbed into my bunk. Joey is nestled into her back. I draped my arm across them both and went back to sleep.
Steve Morgan eventually woke me and said that Tim wanted to get moving soon. I guess we’ll head north and then east.
Saturday, April 19
Tim and I went out on recon today. We used the bicycles. Yesterday was one bad indicator after another. Bridges are being taken out intentionally. It is impossible to tell if it is survivors trying to protect themselves or military trying to take steps to prevent movement of looters…or control the ever-dwindling population of survivors.
Another troubling sign is that we can’t find a gas station that has not been cleaned out. At first we just thought that the remote location had probably not received a refill from a tanker. But yesterday we watched two military trucks roll into a small roadside station. We had intended to hit the place ourselves right after sunset, and were using an abandoned barn to hide and survey. Late in the day we heard the rumble of large vehicles. Eventually these two big trucks rolled into view. They pulled into the gas station, dispatching the handful of zombies in the area as a team of soldiers went to work. Both of the trucks had cylindrical tanks in back and they ran a hose with a pump from the ground tank to the trucks. Then…they torched the place.
We face the real possibility that we might need to abandon the RVs. This changes everything. Tim and I went out with the hopes that this was an isolated case. It is not. This could mean that the only places we could find fuel are the big cities, and that is suicide. Not only are the zombies a problem, but Spokane proved that there are things almost as bad. I still have bad dreams about seeing little Amber Thompson shot and killed by a sniper. Both of her parents meeting the same fate. They had survived together…a family intact…and it was some anonymous survivor who, for no apparent reason, gunned them down. Only then had the zombies been able to take them.
I don’t know what Tim saw today as we searched in futility for something we had taken for granted—fuel—and returned empty. I saw another reason to question why we were fighting so hard to stay alive. Where could we run? Where can we hide?
We have enough fuel including reserves to take us a few hundred miles at best. So, tonight we sit down together with a AAA Road Atlas and figure out where to make a run for that we can reach, because it seems these RVs we’ve been taking for granted just became obsolete.
Sunday, April 20
Things become more bizarre with each passing day. We have been staying put. Not ready to move until we knew exactly where we would go. We were just south and west of someplace called Little Falls. We could not actually see the town from our hiding place, but early this morning we could hear a lot of vehicle activity.
Greg, Tim, Meredith, and I followed the ridgeline we had been parked behind these past few days and had plenty of brush to creep through. We could look down on what Tim said had to be State Route 23. Sure enough, a convoy of military vehicles was creeping along. They were killing every zombie in sight.
At first we thought they would be raiding the town. We guessed that this group or one like it had been the reason Ritzville looked the way it did. Meredith was the first to hear screams. There were survivors in Little Falls! But the convoy seemed oblivious. Two half-tracks with mounted heavy machineguns continued along with guns blazing.
After at least ten minutes, the shooting stopped. It became clear that not all the folks in the convoy were military. We saw all sorts of people jump from the back of the covered trucks and begin running into places—businesses, residences, it didn’t seem to matter—and emerge with arms full of all sorts of stuff. They were stripping the town.
For some reason, I was reminded of the Grinch and his late night raid on Whoville.
Then…the Indians showed up. Native Americans for the politically correct.
The folks raiding the town never saw them coming. We could because we were up on this hill. They swept in from three sides, sneaking into buildings from the side opposite the looters. Whoever was in charge of the convoy was too late in noticing that his people were not returning. I had read in history books about the “war whoop”, but I never figured to hear one for real. This cry cut through the air and suddenly guns opened fire from every direction on the hapless convoy.
Ten minutes later, other than the ones burning, every vehicle was taken. There were no survivors. We hustled back to the RV’s. We had not really considered anything spectacular about the pink swath on the map labeled “Spokane Indian Reservation”.
It seems we’ll need to use caution tonight. We have determined that this is no longer a safe hiding spot. We will have to dive between Spokane and the reservation. Hopefully before any sort of war breaks out in this area. It is a safe guess that the convoy came from the Air Force base. Now it appears as if the Native Americans are reclaiming what was theirs. Take it any way you like, but they are welcome to it. Lord knows we’ve screwed it up enough.
I may have failed to mention this, but the Spokane Reservation Indians…some were actually on horseback. I saw bows, arrows, and a lot of hand-held weaponry in with the guns they used on the convoy. I am curious to know what they are doing to survive…but not curious enough to go onto their land and find out.
Monday, April 21
It is windy, cold, and rainy. We are in some pretty wild country. This isn’t quite a mountain like Mt. Hood or Mt. Rainier, but it is bigger than a foothill. We are looking down on something, and don’t know what to make of it.
It is a small town.
The lights are on.
Thursday, April 24
It is possible that we may be in a place we can stay!
We are on the Washington/Idaho border in what the residents are calling Irony, USA. Situated on a plateau in a rugged valley is a heavily fortified town. The plateau itself is almost two miles wide at its thickest. Shaped sort of like a football that is flat on one side, the town has a dense tree canopy. It sits about thirty feet off the valley floor. One side is bordered by a fast-flowing white-water river that is fed by a waterfall a mile or so up the valley. The other is a thick ravine that slowly inclines several hundred yards before the sheer face of a mountain suddenly thrusts up out of the ground.
The place is well hidden. We would have more than likely missed it entirely if we had not come in from the south. We had been following the river off and on as terrain allowed, seeking a crossing point.
We waited till sunrise to try and get a better idea of what sort of folks were there. We watched a group of about twenty people come to the southernmost tip. They were all armed with assorted weapons, but they also carried buckets and gardening tools. With varying degrees of skill they repelled down on five lines that, once everybody was down, a few young children about Joey’s age pulled up.
There didn’t seem to be any zombies in the area, but it was clear that these people took no chances. They followed the river on the side opposite us and disappeared over a slight ridge. Tim and Samantha crept away to try and see them from another position and returned forty minutes later to report that they had a large fenced garden in an obviously well tended plot of land about the size of half a football field.
After a quick discussion, we backtracked with the RVs and found a place to hide them. It was decided that Antonio, Colleen, Perry, and I would go and see if they were welcoming strangers. If no word returned within a week, everybody would leave and continue seeking a place to try and call home. I made it clear: No hero crap. No rescue. We should be able to tell in a relatively short period of time what sort of folks these were.
The four of us grabbed a few weapons and enough supplies to support our story that we had been on our own as a group surviving off the land. We approached the plateau in plain sight from the northwest, again doing our best to keep knowledge of our comrades’ direction and location as hidden as possible.
We knew we had been spotted when a crowd began to gather along the western edge of the plateau. A man with a bullhorn actually called down to us, telling us to follow the river south to a single tall pine. We did and were met by a handful of men and women on the other side.
They directed us to a six foot log with an eye-bolt screwed into it. A casual look around revealed three more logs of similar size scattered about. Hmm. Clever. They tossed us a nylon line with a big nut-and-bolt weight at the end. Of course it fit in the eye-bolt, and after hauling the log to the water, the folks on the other side pulled us across the thirty foot wide rushing river.
We were asked very politely to come forward one at a time to be searched. After being looked over, and a brief conversation, we were invited to climb up. It was made clear that we would be quarantined—together if we wished—for seventy-two hours for “safety reasons.”
This evening we will be invited to come out and meet people. So far, they’ve treated us fine. They did ask that we relinquish our firearms, but were allowed to keep our hand-held bludgeons.
“Nobody should be without some protection,” a young blond in her twenties named Tara smiled as she led us to a long building that served as a crude medical facility. This is where we spent our isolation time.
We’ve been treated great. Fed well. Had several visitors, who I can’t remember the names of, all inquiring if we need anything.
I’m terrified that I will wake up any moment now to discover this is all a dream.
Friday, April 25
Irony, USA. I get it. It seems that this was a compound built by some fringe white-supremacist group. They set up a town and, while they were apparently on some government watch list, they had managed to live off the grid. When the Z-plague hit, that’s what it is referred to as by folks here (I can’t bring myself to be so glib just yet) the Homeland Security agent assigned to the area died, but not before he told his wife about the compound.
Grace Arndt could be a neighbor on
Desperate Housewives
. She’s in her mid-to-late forties and is a total knockout. That is where the similarities end. Grace is a no-nonsense lady. When she heard about the compound, she rounded up a bunch of her twenty-two-year-old son’s college friends, equipping them at an arsenal of the town’s (she is from Boise) abandoned National Guard depot.
It turns out that somebody had brought the infection in from the outside. All they had to do is clean the place out. Now Derrick Arndt, Grace’s son, is masterminding the garden we saw on the way in. It seems he was a major in Agricultural Science at Oregon State.
I must admit that finding salvation in some separatist compound has an ironic element. Did I also mention that while Grace’s husband was the image of a WASP, at least in the picture I glimpsed in Grace’s house, Grace is what I would call Vanessa Williams-brown, complete with long, silky black hair and green eyes that seem to cut into your soul.