John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Can Die

The Sergeant Major tapped my arm. “Hamilton and the other one can rest here for a while. I doubt they’re up for dancing. But if you would like, I can show you the rest of Isle La Motte.”

Sure enough, we got a tour of the island, although from horseback. The only one of us who could ride competently was Ahmed, and even he was intimidated by the horses when the two young men from last night brought them out. “They’re Shire horses,” she told us as she easily swung up into the saddle. “About the same size as Clydesdales, those big horses you used to see in the beer commercials. They eat everything they can reach, but they don’t balk at the sight of zombies and I’ve trained them to fight. Their height means the rider is more protected from attack, although a horde would bring horse and rider down easily enough.”

Uncomfortable though it turned out to be, I did bask in the luxury of riding instead of walking. My prosthesis wouldn’t fit in the stirrup, but I found I could ride a half-assed sort of sidesaddle when the jolting got too rough, and I didn’t mind Brit’s teasing too much after she fell off twice. “You could sell these to the Army,” I pointed out when we stopped for lunch at the home of another farmer on the north side of the island. “It would be the difference between life and death for scouts.”

The farmer, a big bear of a man with the proverbial farmer’s tan, guffawed loudly as he left the table for his plowing. The farmer’s wife, a lady who looked older than she probably was, shook her head and followed her husband out. “These horses are bred for war, that’s true,” the Sergeant Major explained. “They might do you good when it comes to scout work, but they aren’t easy to care for. You’d spend half your time just searching for grazing, and frankly we don’t have enough to lose. If it wasn’t for the fact that Burlington was mostly empty when the infection reached it, we wouldn’t have enough gas to run our tractors. Eventually we’ll run out, even if we can resupply from South Hero, which I doubt. In two years, we’ll be out of fuel. These horses don’t breed every year, and we need them for the plow and for clearing fields. We won’t sell them, and we’ll fight to keep them.”

I shrugged. “Oh well. It was worth asking.”

She grinned. “It was sheer luck that we have them. If my husband hadn’t retired before me, we wouldn’t have had time to build up the farm and bring in the horses before the plague hit. He spent the last five years of my career up here.”

“Is he that man, Pierre?”

She shook her head, her smile fading. “He died of cancer three years ago. He was halfway through chemo when the plague hit.”

“I’m sorry.” Brit spoke up, the first words she’d said all morning. Her sympathy was real enough, but it was so rare for her to express genuine emotion that even I glanced at her askance.

The Sergeant Major shrugged. “The last months were easier without the drugs and radiation. He said there wasn’t too much pain, but he was tired all the time. I do miss him, but I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to realize how bad things would get.”

“What were the first couple of years like here?” Hart asked as we remounted and carefully turned the horses back south.

“We didn’t starve, I can tell you.” She was at ease on the back of the big gelding, a red roan whose size dwarfed her as a rider on his back. She swayed with the horse’s gait, comfortable on what was essentially a half-ton of solid muscle. “Most of the island had been farmland in the past, and once the community realized what was happening, and what would happen if we got overrun by refugees, it was easy to organize everyone. Bryan — my husband — we didn’t have much trouble with that. It was lean, the first winter, but between foraging expeditions in what was left of Burlington and Champlain in New York, we made it through. Eating badly for six months convinced everyone else to clear their own land, get together to clear marginal land and acreage that belonged to people off-island. The next fall, we had a surplus, and no one has starved. Even with that third handed over to General Asshole, we’ve done fine.”

She wasn’t kidding. What had struck me from the first person I saw that morning was that everyone here was healthy . It wasn’t the stick-thin-barely-surviving that my team and I looked like on a diet of MREs, and it wasn’t the almost-obesity you saw among cannibals surviving on an exclusively meat diet. Everyone here had real muscle, the strength that came from eating well and working hard. As we trotted past well-tended fields and over the one bridge, spanning a wide creek whose sides were carefully brick-lined, I was impressed again at the strength of will it took to organize an entire community in the face of overwhelming odds and succeed, especially in a world where the normal rules had gone out the window when the Undead started hunting the living. I suspected, looking at her upright back, it cost her more than she would admit to keep six hundred people working together, particularly with zombies not more than two or three miles offshore, the last military presence gone. Whatever her feelings about the General, I knew in my gut that he had still supplied them with security, even if it cost more food than they had wanted to give.

But she wasn’t a dictator either. Anyone could see that. The men and women working in the fields waved and called out when they saw her astride the horse, and she waved back. More than once she enlisted us to help a farmer pull a stuck machine out of the mud. Kids chased after us as we trotted down the road, and when she checked on the guards along the wall in the late afternoon, they spoke to her with real respect. Everywhere you looked, her hand was on the community, and it was a hand they evidently welcomed. Brit pushed her horse up next to mine as we waited while the Sergeant Major spoke with those guards, perched on the wood scaffolding that placed them just high enough they could sprawl out in the prone, their bodies protected by the wall, and snipe anything they could see with minimal danger. “We should stay here,” she said softly, her knee touching mine. “We could live here, Nick. No more fighting, no more starving, no more nothing. This place is paradise compared to what we’ve been through.”

“What about the Army? What about all the Soldiers we’ve supported for the last four years? Major Flynn down in Fort Orange is still waiting for our report.”

She gritted her teeth. “We did our part, Nick. And she’s right, she needs more people. Six hundred isn’t enough, this place has to be at least thirty square miles to farm, fortify, and patrol. Six more who can train dozens is a godsend to her, you can see that.”

“Let me think about it.” I cut her off as she opened her mouth to argue. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying we may not be able to ride off into the sunset just yet.” She grimaced but shifted her horse away as the older woman trotted back to us.

Later that evening, I saw what the woman had meant by surplus. She led us back to the main house to check again on Doc and Ziv but also to gather up supper, and Brit damn near swooned when she went into the pantry and saw floor-to-ceiling shelves of canned food. Our resident vegetarian started crying as she looked over the long lines of every vegetable and fruit you can imagine, all pickled or canned or piled in baskets. We all stood there in stunned silence for a while, I don’t mind telling you, because it was more food than any of us had seen since before the plague. “You weren’t kidding,” I said softly. Brit had already snagged a bag of dried apple slices and was alternating them with a huge potato that she simply bit right into, making grunting noises of appreciation.