John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues

Jonesy and Hamilton stood pissing into the river.

“Damn, Jonesy, This water is cold.”

“Deep, too. You can’t play jokes like that on a brother, Doc!”

Brit rolled her eyes at both of them. “Boys.”

I took point, walking down the west side to the lock. We ran into two Zs stumbling down the main road. The first went down from a head shot from my rifle. The second was walking away, upwind from us. Brit took her out with a shot to the back of the head and we stepped around the still-twitching corpse. Doc flipped the first over and took a picture of her face for the National Database. It would go in the missing file, where the software would try to match her face. Not much, but it sometimes answered survivors’ questions. Maybe a one in a hundred got photographed, and one in ten of those got ID’ed. Better than nothing, I guess.

A quick note about our rifles: They’re standard, Army issue M-4s that have been rechambered to take a .22 caliber Long Rifle round, with a bit more charge than a regular .22 LR. Instead of the usual combat load of 180 or so .227 rounds in a regular M-4 load-out, we each carry 600 rounds of .22 Longs in 50 round magazines. We could also use them in our pistols and if we have to, we could use scavenged .22 rounds. It’s impossible to find any .227 rounds anywhere but .22’s are still pretty common in the ruins of sporting goods stores and gun shops. One thing you need when fighting zombies is ammo, and plenty of it. No one is that good to hit a Z in the head every shot, and, especially in combat, it is more like 3 or 4 rounds before you put one through their heads. Another thing they got wrong in the movies.

We heard the howling long before we got there. It grew slowly with each step we took. It seemed to sink right down through our teeth into our bones. The Zombie Moan.

Jonesy stepped up to the edge first and looked over.

“Hollllllyyyyyy shit, Nick, come get a look at this.”

I tapped Ahmed on the shoulder and he took my sector, looking back down the road. I walked over to the edge of the canal lock and looked into the water ten feet below. It was filled with Zs, floating, standing on top of each other, clawing at the concrete wall. The doors of the lock were closed and they had wandered in there from the town. Hundreds of them. Packed in, rotting, bloating. They saw us and started in a surge towards us, piling on top of each other, pushing each other down into the water. Jonesy started popping them in the head with his pistol but I told him to stop and not waste ammo.

“Damn, Nick, this shit creeps me out. What are going to do about this?” I noticed his accent had gotten softer and he was more serious, like it always did when we were discussing a fight.

“Leave it. Take pictures of the canal doors, check out the pump house and the electric machinery, get pics of everything, spray the crap out of the electrical system with the silicone. We gotta keep the stuff in working order but the Zs are going to be Lieutenant Colonel Jackass’s problem.”

“Do you want to open the doors? Let this shit drift into the river?”

“Fuck no. Do that and when we get back to the COP in Stillwater they’re going to be crawling all over the wall. We’re upstream. They can’t swim but they can wash up.”

He shook his head and spit on the Zs trying to climb at us. “Didn’t think of that. This here city boy can’t get directions straight, you know me.”

I walked back to the guys, picked my ruck up off the ground and rummaged for my Nikon.

“Hey Nick, check it out!” Brit pointed and we caught sight of a bald eagle soaring high overhead. The wildlife was coming back strong but I hope it didn’t eat too many of the fish from the river.

“No doubt, the plague was a good thing and bad thing. Make the best and drive on.”

Brit bumped fists with me. “Make the best and drive on.”

“Know what I’m pissed about?”

I sighed as we walked along the river road. Here it comes , I thought.

“I’m pissed that we’re never, ever going to go to the stars. This killed it. Right here.” Brit gestured to the potholes in the road, the ruined house we were walking slowly passed, eyes peeled for Zs.

“Why Brit, I didn’t even know you had such ambitions,” said Ski. Doc walked past, made like he was tightening down the chinstrap on his helmet and hunched his shoulders with an oh no look. Jonesy started whistling and pretending to be interested in some flowers on the side of the road.

“Well, Ski, you don’t know shit about me. For example, what did I do before the plague?”

“I dunno. College girl who banged football players?”

She stopped in midstride and smacked him as hard as she could upside his Kevlar. “DAMN, BRIT, OW!”

“You’re right, but you deserved that anyway, jerk. I was an engineering major. I was going to go to the stars . Or build in space, anyway. Do you understand me? I was going to design space habitats. I wanted to design the first habitation on the moon. It’s all gone now, Nick. All gone.

She started crying, tears rolling down her cheeks, and lengthened her stride. Then she sat down in the road, screamed as loudly as she could and started pounding on the pavement in front of her with her war hammer. The guys walked around her, ignoring her screams and frustrated pounding. After a few minutes, she stopped, slung the hammer over her back, picked up her weapon and resumed the march.

“Hey babe, you OK?”

She looked at me. I knew her backstory. Living in a college campus, in the ruins of Syracuse University. Doc and I had found her holed up in a cafeteria, on one of our first scouts. Six months, living on canned food and having the most god-awful amount of traps around her, drinking rainwater from barrels on the roof. Going slowly crazy with no one to talk to, dodging Zs every day to get wood for a fire. She had nearly taken my head off with a baseball bat and Doc had needed to sedate her to get her calm enough to talk to us. Even now, I wasn’t sure she had completely gotten over it.

“I’m OK. I just got to thinking, you know, about before.”

“Keep that up, you will go crazy. You can’t think about before. You know that.”

PTSD. Crazy. Traumatized. We all are, we all have it. How can you watch the death of almost everyone you loved? OK, for most of us, everyone we loved? How can you watch civilization, or most of it, crumple around you in a month and not go crazy? The Snap, we called it. For a minute, for half an hour, whatever it took, sometimes you just grew so goddamned bitter and angry and felt such a deep sense of loss you broke down and screamed at the world. For some, they broke and never came back. Walked off and were never seen again. Someone like Jacob, he went off into his own world of denial. Thinking this whole thing was a dream. For others, like Jonesy and Ahmed, growing up in the ghetto and in the middle of a war, life honestly wasn’t much different now. Maybe better. They could shoot who they needed to shoot without repercussion, and for the most part, no one cared what color your skin was or which side of the war or city you’d been on. Just that you were alive.

Brit, she was the same story. I knew she had been a straight 4.0 student. Smart as hell. All she cared about now was living life in the right here and now, because the Zombie Apocalypse had stolen her future. Like it had stolen everyone else’s.

On point, Jacob held up his fist, dropped to one knee, cut his hand sideways then pointed forward. People, not Zs. We all dropped down and took up firing positions, a quick hasty ambush set up along the road.