John Holmes: Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues

“You know what sucks about the Zombie Apocalypse?” Brit did her obnoxious eye roll at me. Another profound thought from our fearless leader. She humored me, though, and asked.

“What sucks, oh fearless leader whom I have seen piss his pants from fear?” Sometimes her sarcasm annoys the crap out of me. She sat picking at a piece of MRE cracker in her teeth. She was wearing dirty army ACUs, stained from weeks out in the field, her long red hair tied up under her helmet, blue eyes contrasting with the dirt on her face.

“Toilet paper, or the lack of it. That’s what sucks most about the Zombie Apocalypse. All those books we used to read, and movies, that stupid TV show, and never once did any of them mention that mice and bugs would eat all the toilet paper, and the survivors would have to make due with rags and whatnot.”

“And whatnot? What the eff are you now, Shakespeare?” Again, with the sarcasm when I’m trying to hold forth on a serious subject. The firelight played across the smart-alecky grin on her face, the shadows mixing with the dust we all had on us from today’s patrol.

She turned to Jacob, who sat with his back to the fire, watching the stars through the hole in the roof of the old farmhouse. “Jake, in this dream you’re having, why don’t we have toilet paper?”

He ignored her, knowing better than to engage Brit when she was in one of her moods, and kept staring at the stars. I knew what he was watching for. The Space Station, passing overhead, beautiful and dead.

“Leave him alone, Brit. He’s pulled his weight so far on this patrol.”

“It just creeps me out. I mean, why does he get to hide in unreality and I am stuck dealing with reality?”

“You creep me out. A vegetarian zombie slayer. Disgusting. Jake can’t help what’s going on in his head. You being retarded and not eating meat is a sick lifestyle choice. By the way, that MRE cracker you just ate is made from used animal byproducts.” To emphasize it, I took a big bite out of the squirrel that I had been roasting on the fire. She shot me a disgusted look and continued to wolf down her hummus.

Jake turned back to the fire. “How can I explain what goes on in my dream? Someday I’m going to wake up and who knows if I’ll even remember this? I think I’m in a coma, and I’m not going to ever wake up. In which case, Brit, you’re stuck with me.”

Brit stared at him for a minute. Jake had joined the patrol yesterday in Waterford, dumped on us by the FEMA idiots. He seemed OK, had been on the ball so far, but every now and then he just got a spacey look.

“Jake, you really believe this is just a dream.”

“Yup.”

“Really? I have to sit here and watch some grubby pig gnaw on a squirrel because you’re dreaming it? How about you dream me back to college or something, where I can be getting laid by some football player on nice clean sheets? With fluffy pillows all around and nice silk things to wear instead of a nasty five day-old uniform?”

Jake sighed. “It’s like this, Britnney. People don’t rise from the dead. It’s impossible. Can’t happen. Once you are dead, you’re dead. So I’m dreaming this. Or more like I’m having a nightmare. Maybe I was in a car accident or something. I dunno. Hopefully I wake up soon, my wife will be snoring next to me in bed and my kids will be fighting downstairs over the TV. This is just a really long-ass nightmare.”

People lost everything. I lost my family. My wife, my daughter. Hell, I had to beat my wife’s head in with my rifle butt when she came after me, blazing red Zombie eyes, trying to bite my head off. Millions, maybe billions have died, and now we’re living in some Mad Max kinda freaky world. This is just Jacob’s way of dealing with it without going totally insane. He really thinks he’s dreaming this whole thing. What I’m worried about: At some crucial moment, he’s going to realize this isn’t a dream and lose it right then and there. I might have to put a bullet in him then, because this is not the world I would want to wake up to.

“I got yer reality right here, Jacob.” With that, Brit leaned to one side and let one rip.

“Careful doing that close to the fire. You’ll get burned.”

“Haha, pig.”

“OK, Jacob. You’re on the next watch, two hours with Brit relieving Jonesy one hour from now. You know the Zs might come. If they do, you know the rules. Wake one other person; and try to take them out silently. We don’t need to have some howling screaming shit waking up every Z in the neighborhood. Come on, Brit, I know this is a safe house, but let’s check the basement one more time before lights out.”

Jacob went through the routine of checking his gear. As a scout, your gear stays next to you or on you at all times, even in a safehouse. We stand guard with our packs on our backs because you never, ever know when things are going to go to shit and you will have to run for it. Then your ass is out in the wilderness, with help dozens of miles away, zombies and wild animals roaming the woods and deserted towns, and nothing to save yourself except what you have on you. I’ve been there, alone in the dark. It’s damned scary. Hammock, rope, water filter, two MREs, extra ammo, compass, multi-tool, poncho, lighter, small .22 caliber revolver, signal flare. All fit into a small pack that you didn’t touch unless you really needed it. They can and will save your life.

Brit ran the crank on her light and I flicked the safety off my M-4. Her job, behind me, was to keep the light where I needed it. She might be a vegetarian smartass with a sex drive like a Mack truck, but she was my partner. We headed down the stairs to the basement.

I had called this a “safehouse” and hopefully it was. To us a safehouse was usually an old stone farmhouse which we had used before. Whenever we got a chance, we pulled stone from the second floor and bricked up the windows. The front door was barricaded lumber ripped from the walls, overlapped and hammered into place. Upstairs, there were two coiled ropes for making a quick getaway, one with a grapnel hook we could use to catch into a nearby tree. We could hold out here for as long as our water lasted, but once a Z showed up, they started screaming and more and more would come from miles around. The Army actually ran missions where they would fort up in a place like this, bring in pallets of ammo, spend days shooting everything that showed up and then clear out by helo. They did that when they wanted to clear an area for “resettlement” or needed to salvage something from a nearby site.

Not for us Scouts. We walked by day to objectives we were told to check out. We lived outside the wire in our own fortresses. Ours was in Stillwater, on an island in the Hudson River. We had barricaded the two bridges and lived in the house on the island between them. Zs don’t like the water. They can’t swim but they do fall in the water sometimes and get dragged along the bottom by the current, washing up somewhere downstream. To guard against that we’ve built a six foot- high wall around the house, and we’re trying to grow our own food. Nothing like the Fobbits that lived in the Army base downriver or the pogs that lived (existed?) in the FEMA camps outside Buffalo, working the fields.

Last time were we were in this particular house was about two months ago, scouting upriver to see what remained of the hydroelectric plant in Glens Falls. Our mission this time was to check the locks on the canal system and report back to the Army Engineers on them. We had cleared this place, taking it in a quick rush through the door just before sunset, when the Zs were least active. I had killed two with my shotgun on the second floor. I was just relaxing and shoving shells into the magazine when one had jumped on me from the hole in the roof. That was when I pissed my pants. Brit would never let me forget it. She about knocked both our heads off with the baseball bat and had kept a gun on me for more than an hour to see if I had been infected. I laugh about it now, but right then? It had literally scared the piss out of me.