Gnash Page 21

  Finally, the man reappeared at the gate and said through the bullhorn, “Ok, stand up and move to the center of the street, we’re gonna search you, then you can talk to the doc.”

  “You can see we’re armed,” Grayson shouted.

  “We don’t care that you’re armed, we need to ensure none of you are infected,” came the reply.

  Grayson tried to hide the shock that must have been evident on his face and glanced knowingly at the other three.

  “Alright, arms up,” the bullhorn ordered.

  The group complied and several men came out of the house to their left carrying different types of weapons. They spread out in a circle around Grayson’s little group. A woman stepped forward and said, “Alright everybody, we need to see all the skin that we can, so pull up your sleeves, show us your arms. Then pull up your shirt, show us your waist and pull down your collar so we can see your neck. Then pull up your pant legs, so we can…”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous,” Sam said. “I’m just going to take off my clothes and you can get an eyeful.” He took off his shirt, shoes and pants, leaving only his underwear on and stretched his arms out.

  Grayson and Gretchen quickly followed suit. Jamie, thankful that they’d stopped by her sister’s house for her undergarments and some clothing, took her clothes off as well. This act seemed to put the circle of guards more at ease.

  “Ok, I don’t see any bite marks. Anyone else see anything?” the woman asked. After everyone from the group answered in the negative, she waved over her head towards the gate. “Ok, let’s go.”

  As they followed the woman from the Pecan Valley security element, everyone else broke off and returned to the house. “That was pretty slick,” Grayson said. “Your gate guards distracted us while the real security element was positioned outside the gate under cover in a house. That’s a really professional trick, where’d you guys learn that?”

  “Our HOA President was a SEAL in Vietnam. When the disaster hit, he became our unofficial leader, passed along a few tips on how they did things back then, even though he’s too old to really do them himself anymore,” she said as they passed through the gate. “Name’s Carrie, you?”

  Grayson introduced everyone and shook her hand. “What’s this about being infected?” he asked.

  “Zombies, man. Have you been living under a rock?”

  “We had a run in with somebody who bit one of our neighborhood watch members, who subsequently became infected, but the problem was taken care of,” he answered while avoiding any mention of Justin, the missing resident who’d been bitten by his friend. “That’s what we had originally came to talk to your doctor about, but then she died, now we need to know how to avoid further infection and if there’s any treatment in case one of our other members gets sick.”

  “There isn’t a cure. The only thing you can do is kill them before they kill you. And the only way you can kill ‘em is by shooting them in the head or bashing in their brains, although, I personally think that if you decapitated one of them, that would work too, but I’m not willing to get close enough to try that.

  “So, you said one of your team died from her bite?” she asked as they continued toward the center of the community. “Did she turn into one of them yet or did you think she was dead and left to come here? Because she’s gonna turn. If she turned after you left, you might have a major problem on your hands when you get back.”

  “No, we…” he glanced at Jamie and stopped.

  “Grayson killed her when she attacked him,” Jamie stated plainly. “Don’t worry, there was nothing left of her when he was done. She was my sister.”

  “I’m sorry honey. But believe me, I’ve seen enough of these things to tell you that your sister was already dead before she started attacking people. What he killed was no longer your sister. They don’t turn until the person dies, then they reanimate and become a zombie. Here we are. I’ll introduce you to Bill Downs, the boss-man.”

  An older gentleman, who looked to Grayson to be around 65 or 70 years old, stepped out onto the porch. “Would you cut that shit out, Carrie?” he said as closed the door gently behind himself. “My name is Doctor Bill Downs, until we can restore some order around town, the residents of Pecan Valley have elected me to help lead and make any of the hard decisions. My man at the gate said you had some folks with injuries, what can I do for you?”

  After the introductions were made, Grayson cleared his throat, “Well sir, it seems like you’ve ran into the same things we have.”

  “You mean the zombies,” the doctor said as he made quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

  “Yeah. Well, we had a member of our neighborhood turn into one of them, don’t worry, she’s dead,” he said glancing at Carrie, “We wanted to know if you had any idea how to combat the sickness or what we should do with an infected person.”

  Bill gestured toward the woman who’d led them inside from the gate, “Carrie here says the only way to cure someone is to dispose of them. I’m not so sure, but I can’t figure out how to treat any of them. We even tried to catch a few and secure them in a house, but that ultimately ended up being a near disaster for our neighborhood and we had to put them out of their misery.

  “Now, if one of them sons a bitches is attacking you, then obviously, you have to do what you have to do. But I do think that when the government gets things settled again…”

  “Not this shit again Dad,” Carrie interrupted him. Grayson raised his eyebrow at her revelation that Bill Downs was her father. She turned towards Grayson’s group. “We came across the remains of a National Guard unit that got decimated by the zombies. Hell, we even took in a few stragglers who weren’t infected and picked up a lot of their equipment. The commander of the unit didn’t authorize his men to open fire until it was too late and they’d been overrun.”

  “Shit. We’d been hoping the National Guard would help restore things,” Gretchen said.

  “The government will get things settled down before too long. We beat the Russians in the Cold War; we can take care of a little biological threat. It’s just a matter of figuring out what makes ‘em tick,” Bill asserted. “But for the immediate future, we’ve only got each other. I’m glad you folks made the trip over from Three Pillars. That’s, what, four, maybe five miles away?”

  “Closer to four, I think,” Grayson said.

  “Good, we can try to stay in communication with each other. How is your security? You said you ran into some already, have you shored up your defenses against them?”

  “We’ve got our neighborhood sealed off pretty well. Not as good as yours appears to be, but I believe it will hold off an attack.”

  “That’s good too. What we’ve figured out so far is that they’re not very smart individually, but they get progressively smarter the more of them there are, so it’s best if you can deal with them one at a time, especially at a distance with your rifle,” Bill said as he gestured at the 30.06 slung across Grayson’s back.

  “The biggest pack of them that our security forces have had to fight was about ten or so, but even that was a big task,” Carrie said. “It was like the ‘zombies’ were seeing through each other’s eyes and helping the other out. Very creepy stuff.

  “They started showing up a few days ago. At first we thought they were just people who’d went crazy or something, but then they killed a few of our guys who were trying to keep them out of the gate. When our gate guards reanimated, then we knew we were in trouble. One of the teenagers actually helped us to realize what we were up against.”

  Carrie took a deep breath, “So, we took the advice of a kid who’d read way too many comic books and it turned out to be real. The virus, or whatever, doesn’t appear to be airborne or carried on the skin of the beasts. We’ve had several close brushes with these things, lots and lots of scratches and scrapes, but the only way the virus transfers, that we know of, is through a bite.”

  “Probably in the saliva,” Bill piped in. “I’d bet it’s car
ried in their other bodily fluids as well, since it appears to take over their entire body. But, there’s lots of medical evidence, pre-zombie, to indicate that some viruses and bacteria can be carried in certain fluids and not in others. However, there’s just as much evidence that different types of viruses pervade all the body fluids, like HIV, so it’s better safe than sorry.”

  “Ok, so no open mouth kissing the zombies then,” Gretchen said to a chorus of groans.

  “Well, anyways,” Carrie continued, “we believe that bites are 100% fatal. So far, we’ve had more than twenty people bitten and every one of them died, then turned into a zombie. We’re talking minor bites, not a big deal, but the wound begins to rot almost immediately and then they get really sick and die. Reanimation is usually within a couple hours, frequently a lot sooner, depending on the number and severity of the bites.

  “Like I said before, the only way to kill them is to destroy their brain somehow. The only other thing we’ve found that kills them is burning. But it’s not very practical, because they end up walking around, on fire, catching everything else on fire, until eventually the flames burst their brains. That was one of the comic book lessons that wasn’t particularly helpful.”

  Bill cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention, “We don’t know where they came from, how far reaching the sickness is, or any of that. They seem to be able to see and hear, but not very well. There’s no known cure. And trying to capture one for study almost got everyone killed. That about covers everything we know about these things. What are your questions?”

  Everyone looked to Grayson. “I guess, given your statements, the only thing I can think of is how are you guys are set for weapons and ammo?” he asked. “Over at Three Pillars, we don’t have much and it sounds like the best thing to do is hunker down and wait this out until the government can get to us.”

  “We have all the weapons from the National Guard convoy, plus a lot more,” Bill answered. “Several of our residents were cops and firefighters and most of the folks who live here aren’t as liberal as those over at your place, so more than half of us had private weapons anyways. We can spare a few M-16s and we’ve got more ammo than we could ever conceivably use, but what we don’t have is very much food or a secure place to grow anything.”

  “We have lots of open spaces and even a huge softball field that we could plant!” exclaimed Jamie. “I know how to farm. My family had a small vegetable garden growing up. There’s a few streams through the property that we could use for water. It’s a little late in the season, but we can try. We just need seeds.”

  Bill glanced at Carrie and said, “It’s risky, but about five miles down the road, just outside of town, there’s a large gardening center. They have seeds that we could get and probably most of the supplies we’d need.

  “Look Grayson, we can be mutually beneficial here. We don’t have hardly any free space here in this subdivision, virtually nothing within our fences anyways, and there’s nothing really close that can be easily secured either. We can give you the means to protect yourselves against the zombies, and provide you with some workers for the crops if you need them, and you can provide us with safe land to grow our food on.

  “I assume that you were sent over here with the authority to make some decisions for your neighborhood, so what do you say, does Three Pillars want to work with Pecan Valley? We can even set up a mutually-beneficial protection pact to help each other out if we get attacked by a force of these things that we can’t handle.”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal, Doctor. I believe that for both of our communities to survive, this may be our best bet for any of us,” Grayson said as he stuck out his hand. “And you may think that you haven’t given us very much information about these zombie-things, but you gave us a lot more than we had, so thank you.

  “I need to send back two of my guys here so they can let Curtis know. He’s the semi-official leader of our community.” Grayson looked towards his three companions with a question in his eyes.

  “I’m staying right here with you,” Jamie stated as a matter of fact.

  “Well, that settles it then, we’ll head back to Three Pillars,” Sam said.

  “We’ll send a group with your two folks to act as security and help carry some of the weapons and ammunition. There won’t be enough time to gather everything and get over there and back in the daylight, so I recommend going tomorrow morning.” Carrie said. “It’s safer to do everything we can in the daytime so we can see if any zombies follow us because of the vehicle sounds. Like Dad said, they don’t see well, but I suspect they see better than us in the darkness,” she explained.

  “I like it, shows you we’re willing to cooperate with your community for the common good,” the doctor said with a smile. “We’ll also send over two Army radio sets, a battery charging station and the solar panels for it and teach you how to use them so we can stay in contact with you. We did have a ham radio, but once the generators died, we couldn’t use it anymore.”

  “We really appreciate all this help. I can’t believe our good fortune. Thank you so much,” Grayson said. “Now, I’m ready to try to go and get those seeds as soon as possible so we can start planting.”

  “Ok, since it’s about four thirty or five now, we’ll assemble a strike team and an escort team, then we’ll head out first thing in the morning,” Bill said. “Carrie can show you four to an empty house to stay for the night. Plan on meeting back here at 8 am.”

  ***

  “So what happened to the previous tenants?” Jamie asked as she looked around the apartment’s fully-furnished living room. It had the look and feel of being recently lived in and there didn’t appear to be much dust.

  “The couple got smoked the other day. They were our first losses. Happened right outside the gate in plain view of our guards,” Carrie stated. “We didn’t know anything about what was happening and we hadn’t really had too much of a problem with the gangs that seemed to be everywhere, guess they decided to leave the working-class neighborhoods alone.

  “Anyways, these two were out for a walk and a few zombies attacked them. Tore them to shreds before the guards finally decided to take action. I didn’t know them, but I hear they were a really nice, Christian couple.”

  Jamie’s face had visibly drained of blood and she took an involuntary step closer to Grayson.

  “So here you are then. The water point is at the corner of Timberwood and Elm, there should be a lot of extra buckets over there, but I’d recommend going before dark so you don’t get lost and end up near the wall, the guards get pretty jumpy at night. Just a word of caution, after you get settled in, go around, make sure all the windows and doors are locked. We haven’t had any issues since we started actually securing the gates, but around here we go by the motto that it’s better safe than sorry. Also, if you hear car horns, prepare to defend yourself because the fence has been breached.”

  “Well, we appreciate the place to stay, thank you. We’ll see you in the morning then,” Grayson said as he shut the door behind Carrie.

  They decided to get the water right away before it even got close to dusk, so the two men went to retrieve a few buckets of water so everyone could get cleaned up while the Gretchen and Jamie explored the apartment. It was a standard two-bedroom, two-bath place with a living room and small kitchen/dinette combination. A quick search of the cupboard revealed some canned food and a few boxes of pasta. They had to open up several windows to air out the smell after Gretchen cracked the refrigerator door to see what was inside.

  Gretchen claimed the master bedroom for herself and Sam, which left a full-size bed in the guest room and the couch for Grayson and Jamie, but she already stated that they’d share the bed.

  “So what’s up with you and Grayson?” Gretchen asked as the two of them set out the items on the counter to cook over the grill on the balcony. They’d settled on boiling a box of noodles in the sturdiest pot they could find and then mixing in some kidney beans, tuna fish and
some seasoning from the pantry.

  “I don’t know, I just feel really, really safe around him. I know he can protect me. I like him a lot; he’s so nice, funny and smart. And he’s really cute!”

  “Well, I hope you can be happy, but you’ve got to understand that this might all be temporary, well, hopefully, the zombie and no power thing will be temporary,” the older woman emphasized the word “will” in her sentence. “He had a fiancé out in D.C. when the bomb went off, so she’s probably dead, but he was planning on going back out there, at least he was before the two of you started hanging around each other.”

  “I know, but I’ll cross that bridge when we get there. For right now, it makes sense. I’m single, he’s a really good guy and it’s a huge bonus that he’s my best chance at survival. I’m just not sure if he likes me like that, y’know?”

  “I see the way he looks at you. He does like you, a lot. I don’t want you to get hurt, but you’re a big girl. As long as you realize what you’re getting into, then go ahead and see what happens.”

  Their conversation turned to the preparation of the food and before too long, Grayson and Sam returned, each carrying two five-gallon buckets of water. The Pecan Valley water point was divided into two sections, the first, was potable water from a fire truck and the second was an elaborate system of auto-siphons connected to hoses leading to the neighborhood swimming pool. That water could safely be used for bathing, flushing the toilets and cleaning clothes, but due to the chemicals, it wasn’t safe for drinking long-term. It was a very practical use of the water that they hadn’t thought of and planned to transplant that idea to their own neighborhood once they returned.

  They’d taken one bucket of the potable water and three of the pool water. The pot was filled with some of the potable water and Sam watched over it to ensure it didn’t tip over or melt in the heat of the grill. While he did that, everyone else cleaned up with washcloths dipped in the bucket and soap they’d found in the bathrooms.