Cities of the Dead: Winters of Discontent (7 page)

Frank turned his head to her and
said,
“I
’
m coming up now. We cheated death, today, so
it
’
s time to
celebrate life.
”

Will threw another log on the
fire.
“Have fun. I
’
m gonna work my way through some
more of that bottle.
”

A week later, Frank and the other
men were deep in the woods looking for game, the sky overhead
crowded with clouds and littering the world with a steady stream of
snow flurries. He had his Mossberg 500 shotgun and a 9mm Beretta on
him, but it was the compound bow and fifteen arrows that he was
relying on. Nobody liked to use firearms anymore because ammunition
was tough to come by, and the bullets were best used on rival
tribes of humans than on the undead. Frank hadn
’
t seen that coming: the
breakdown of civilization into small units. Not everyone was
hostile, but most were: nobody had anything and everybody was eager
to get something. And the zombies had nothing. Anybody still
counted as among the living had survived the Darwin cut and could
usually kill the undead without having to shoot them. Which was why
everyone trudging through the snowy forest today had a bow and a
blade in addition to a firearm.

The four men worked through the
woods slowly, in a skirmish line with a hundred yards between them.
Mike and Pat were to Frank
’
s left, Will to his right. Frank
had met Mike and Pat in the fall when he and Will and parked the
aircraft and scouted the cottages along the Allegheny River near
the Kinzua Dam. They had wanted to find someplace to lodge for the
winter that wasn
’
t too close to a town. Population centers attracted the
undead, requiring keeping watches during the night which neither of
them enjoyed. But, they also wanted to be close enough that they
could go into it and forage. There was still plenty of canned goods
in household pantries, and you never knew what other useful stuff
you could turn up. Stores, on the other hand, had largely been
denuded of everything edible by the end of the first year. He had
learned that lesson hard when they had tried a raid into Pittsburgh
and lost everyone except Olandis from their original
group.

Neither Frank nor Will had been
hunters before the end times. They had had to teach themselves
everything Mike and Pat had learned from their fathers. Over beers,
Frank and Will had occasionally talked about learning how to hunt,
but skirt-chasing had always taken precedence. After the last few
years of doing it, Frank now knew he didn
’
t like hunting,
didn
’
t like the
long hours of searching, tracking, waiting. Fishing was even worse.
He wanted the old world back, his old life back, his wife back. He
wanted to sit on a bar stool with Will and merrily complain about
married life and then switch gears to what it would like to be a
dad.

Frank stopped in the snow and
stared at nothing, realizing his mind had wandered back to the
past. What had happened, had happened, and nothing was going to
change that. He lived in a cottage in the woods alongside the
Kinzua River with a girlfriend and his best friend. They could both
die today. He could die today. The past and everything in it was
irrelevant. Yesterday wouldn
’
t save him if he stumbled upon a
lurker zombie covered in the snow. Tomorrow didn
’
t exist. Today was life, and he
was in the Allegheny National Forest hunting with a bow, not
sitting in his office at the bank processing mortgages and
investment accounts.

An hour later he heard
Will
’
s P90 fire
once. Twice. Three times. Then repeatedly, the reports nearing him.
Frank unslung his shotgun and took a knee, looking through the
flurries for a sign of his friend. Will had taken to wearing a
white cloak over his clothing so that he could blend into the snow
more easily. Frank
’
s radio crackled to life.

“
What the hell is
Will shooting at?
”
asked
Mike over the walkie.

Everybody knew the sounds of
everybody else
’
s weapon. Mike had a Winchester .308 that boomed, Pat had
an AR-15 that kapowed, Frank
’
s shotgun kabloomed, and
Will
’
s P90 went
pow.

Frank clicked his walkie,
“
I don’
t
know, but he
’
s
sure as shit going through his magazine in a
hurry.
”

A half-dozen more shots rang out in the
distance and then the snow fallen world fell silent, again. Frank
ran his eyes back and forth through the woods, trying to find
something that would make sense of the sudden eruption of gunfire
from Will.

“
Hey, Will, you
listening to this freq?
”
Frank said into the walkie. They were all on the same
frequency, so if Will were still alive, he
’
d have heard what he had just
said to Mike.
“
Click if you
have to.
”

Nothing.

“
Will, are you
out there? Can you read me?
” Frank
said.

Nothing. Minutes went by. Frank
raised his hand to his forehead and dragged it down over his eyes
and groaned. He had known Will for fifteen years, had roomed with
him in flight school in the Army and served in the same National
Guard helicopter battalion in Washington, Pa. before they had
gotten out. Frank had moved to Pittsburgh with Will on the strength
of Will
’
s
conviction that it was a perfectly sized city, with one of
everything that a bigger city had. When Greg and Al had left the
Army two years later, both of them had moved there, too, based on
Will
’
s - and,
later Frank
’
s -
testimonials. Will had a pull on people few others Frank knew could
match, and now, somewhere out in the woods, Will had gone
silent.

Frank pressed the button on his
walkie, waited a beat, and said,
“
Come on Will, tell me you can hear
me.
”

“
Yeah, I hear
you, I
’
m right
behind you,
”
Will
said.

Frank spun around.

“
Don
’
t shoot, it
’
s me.”

“
What the fuck
just happened out there?
”

And then Frank saw the blood on
Will
’
s winter
smock,
“Are you bit?”

Will looked down at
himself.
“
No. Fucking undead
blood. Listen, we
’
ve got like a minute to two to get the fuck outta here.
There
’
s a
thousand-plus horde of the dead moving up Route 6, and
they
’
re all
through the woods. There
’
s maybe a couple hundred super
runners leading them, and they
’
ll be here in a couple of
seconds, so we need to start running to the Humvees. We gotta drive
over, get Stacey, and get to the gyros. Then we have to fly to
anywhere half-an-hour away where we can land, since we
don
’
t have much
gas in them.
”

Frank looked through the woods and
saw nothing. Moving through the deep snow took effort, and even the
super-runners barely managed to walk fast through it. The shufflers
could take ten times longer. And though he hated to admit it, ever
since the Pittsburgh fiasco, Frank trusted Will
’
s judgement less. Will was prone
to quick decisions under pressure rather than thinking things
out.

“
What about Pat
and Mike? We can
’
t fly them with us. Maybe we should all just shelter in
place and wait it out. The zulus might not even come up to the
cabins, they might just head into town like they usually do and
leave after a couple of days.
”

Will looked around through the
woods and nodded.
“
Sure, but
let
’
s get to
the cabins first and talk about it there. We don
’
t have much time to waste
here.
”

Frank used his walkie to tell Mike and Pat to
meet them at the rally point on Kinzua Road near Verbeck Island, a
spot nearly a mile behind them and almost a half-hour worth of
run-trudging through the deep snow, near where he and Will had
parked the vehicles on Eagle Lane. But instead of a response, Frank
listened to gunfire off to his left. He looked at Will
incredulously. And then he saw a pair of runners furiously
skip-hopping through the forest, their eyes fixed on him and
Will.

“
Fuck,”
Frank said plaintively,
“
it never stays good for
long.
”

Will swung his rifle off his back, aimed
through his ACOG sight and took the two down.

Frank looked at Will.
“You
’
re
right, it
’
s
time to run.
”

And then Frank and Will did what they had done
hundreds of times: ran for their lives. By the time they got to the
rally point, Frank was exhausted and over-heated, unzipping his
coat and stripping off his hat and gloves while sucking in deep
gasps of frigid air. He pulled his canteen off his belt and drank
deeply, the cold water chilling him as it poured down his throat
into his stomach.

A few minutes later they were
brushing the snow off one of the Humvees, the cottages on Eagle
Lane empty, abandoned or forgotten years earlier by their owners.
They were hunting lodges and summer vacation homes most people
wouldn
’
t have
retreated to at the beginning of the end times, and had been
stripped bare of useful items long before Frank had set up shop on
the other side of the Allegheny River when Autumn had set in, and
those looters were long since gone. Or undead.

Will hopped into the vehicle and cranked it to
life. Frank keyed the talk button on his walkie.

“
Mike, Pat, are
you two on the way?
”

Only the engine made noise. Frank
looked up into the sky as Mother Nature let down snow flurries.
Snowflakes. Frank tried the walkie again, waited, and shoved it
into his pocket. He
’
d never see Mike and Pat alive, again. Like so many others.
He looked around at the abandoned neighborhood, covered deep in
snow, the world silent, sounds muffled. The
Humvee
’
s engine
was almost an abomination, rumbling arrhythmically, the only
man-made sound in existence anywhere within who-knew-how-many
square miles.

“
Shit.”
Frank saw a dozen slow walkers forcing their way through
the snow past a closed-up swimming pool on the other side of the
street, hatred in their eyes. They were a skeletal lot, skin
exposing bones, clothes tattered. But none of them had ever seen
the inside of a grave, they were all infected, and whatever they
had become, they had turned to prey on the
living.

“
Get in!”
Will shouted.

Frank popped the door open and
slid onto the seat. He looked out the front window and saw dozens
more on where the street had once been, all of them shuffling
relentlessly toward the sound of the truck
’
s engine. The undead knew the
sounds of the living, and the combustion engine was one of them.
They knew inside it was fresh meat.

“
Aww, fuck,” Frank said. “We
can
’
t go that
way.
”

“
We were never
going that way,
”
Will said,
shifting the vehicle into gear and turning toward the
river.

Will drove the truck across the lawn slowly,
the frozen river looming large before them.

“
Get ready,
I
’
m going to
gun it over,
”
Will
said.

“
We
’
ll crash through the ice. What
the fuck?
”

“
The ice is ten
inches thick and the river is three feet deep here, I think
we
’
re going to
make it either way. But we aren
’
t making it up that road through
the horde, so hold on.
”

Will gunned the engine and the
truck sprang forward and onto the river. Frank looked out the side
window at the frozen river to his right, up toward where the dam
was around the bend in the river. Here was another thing
he
’
d never done
before: drive on a frozen river. The zombie apocalypse sure
produced a lot of unexpected firsts. It was only a few seconds
before Will was driving up the opposite bank, slowing down in the
deep snow. Will turned the truck to the side and Frank looked out
his window across the river, at where the horde was. Dozens of the
undead were stumbling through the snow down to the ice. Frank
couldn
’
t
believe they hadn
’
t frozen solid, given that most of them were wearing
threadbare clothing and were shrunken like Nazi Holocaust victims.
They couldn
’
t
live - they didn
’
t live - and, yet, they lived.