Cities of the Dead: Winters of Discontent

Cities of the Dead: Winters of Discontent

  By William Young

  A sequel to Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse

  Copyright 2014 by William Young

  Table of Contents

  Squatters Rights

  Then Cain Turned on Abel

  The Start of the Breakdown

  A Slim Chance at a Narrow Escape

  ***

  SQUATTERS’ RIGHTS

  Erie, Pennsylvania - Day 482

  Dexter sat on his stool on the ice of frozen Lake Erie and waited for a bite. Of all the injustices life could deal, this topped them: civilization was gone, the undead walked the earth (eating people, no less) and the current winter was the coldest he could remember from his thirty-five years of life. He was no stranger to ice fishing - he even liked it - but having to keep an eye out for the undead stripped the activity of the relaxation that normally accompanied it. That, and the fact that he now had to catch fish to feed his family took the fun out of it. It was no longer a hobby, but a requirement.

  He turned his head across the ice and saw nothing but the bleak landscape of frozen lake. Once upon a time there would have been others out here with him, in canvas huts with propane heaters in them, but now there was just him. Maybe the rest were afraid to venture out into the open, where there was no place to hide should an undead horde suddenly appear, but he had a wife and kids to feed. The deer hunting wasn’t going so well, and the small game were almost non-existent.

  He was surprised his family had made it this long. Most hadn’t. Whatever had happened had infected nearly half the city and surrounding counties within a few days, the zombies suddenly everywhere. Those that hadn’t been infected found a radical new world order imposed on them overnight. Not that there hadn’t been any warning that something was coming: California had gone under the plague first, going dark to the world over the course of a few weeks in January a year earlier. The big cities had started falling quickly afterward, and by spring civilization was gone. The only good thing about it was that he’d lost the twenty pounds he’d put on since getting married.

  He felt a tug on the line and pulled a walleye up through the hole. He slipped it into the creel and figured four fish would have to cut it: he’d been out exposed for too long. He hurriedly broke down his equipment and slipped it into a canvas bag and began to quickly walk off the lake toward shore, a marina area near the mouth of Walnut Creek. He slowed down as he stepped through the raggedy ice near the edge of the beach: a broken leg would end him as surely as the undead.

  He crept up from the shoreline and huddled behind a boulder alongside the parking area, peeking up over it and scanning the snow-covered area. There was three feet of the stuff, but the chains on the Ford Bronco’s tires made quick work of it, mostly. He’d been using his snowmobile since the beginning of winter, but he’d busted a skid on it a few weeks back escaping a horde of zombies that had, as usual, come out of nowhere. He shouldn’t have panicked, they moved too slowly in the snow to catch him, but the sheer number of them had boggled his mind and he’d crashed into a Jersey barrier. The sled had gotten him most of the way home, but it had taken him until after sunset to slog the rest of the way. His wife, Carly, has assumed the worst and had broken down into tears seeing him enter the house through the back door, stamping his shoes in the mud room.

  She had a revolver in hand, of course, just to be sure.

  The parking lot was clear of the undead, so he slid into the Bronco and started it up, creeping out of the marina and along the narrow band of smooth snow he knew covered what had been the road. He drove past a few groups of the undead pushing their way aimlessly through the snow, registering his presence in the vehicle with snarls. One of them paused and watched him intently, its head unsteady on its neck, but its eyes fixed on him in the vehicle. Dexter wondered why - how - they didn’t freeze solid, seeing as they were not dressed for winter, but he’d never bothered to consider thinking of examining one.

  He picked up the walkie-talkie off the seat as he sat idling at the end of the cul-de-sac in which they now lived, a gated community with a low concrete fence all around it that had been abandoned over the course of the previous summer. He couldn’t figure out why: the four-foot high fence was enough to keep the zombies out because they couldn’t climb over it, and sturdy enough they couldn’t push through it. The backyards that abutted it were large enough to obscure most human activity and sound from within the perimeter. The only weak spot was the front gate, which was a makeshift collection of fence materials pilfered from an 84 Lumber and was secured by a thick steel chain and a key operated padlock that only people on the inside had access to.

  He keyed the talk button. “Hey, guys, it’s me at the front. Come let me in.”

  He turned and scanned through the windows, making sure there weren’t any undead around. If they came before he was through the gate, he’d have to leave and wait it out somewhere else. Sometimes, the zombies would stay for hours in place, swaying, turning circles and stumbling around. It was almost as if they knew you were going to come back.

  “We see you,” Carly said a moment later, after searching through binoculars to make sure he was alone.

  Dexter watched through the front windshield as Carly emerged from their house - third on the left. Smoke from wood fires lifted into the air from four of the houses as the sun set behind him over Lake Erie.

  “I’m watching you now, Dad,” said his son a moment later. “Everything looks to be okay.”

  “Just keep watching, Ben. Mom’s outside and you can never know what might happen.”

  “I know,” Ben said with just a hitch of attitude. Dexter smiled and looked through the windows, again.

  “Motherfucker.”

  Coming down the street in the tracks his vehicle had laid through the snow were hundreds of undead. He flashed the headlamps of the car and saw Carly start looking about as she approached the gate. Inside, the road was shoveled, so she was making better time of it than the zombies ever would. But, still. Some of the undead could almost sort-of kind-of “run.” A moment later she saw the horde approaching and ran to the gate, undoing the lock and opening the fence. He drove in and stopped, watching over his shoulder as she pushed the gate closed and locked the chain through the gates. She ran up to the passenger side and slid into the seat.

  “Wow, two months in a row you’ve had a narrow escape,” she said.

  He smiled. If only she knew it were more often than that. He looked over his shoulder out the window. “These guys are still ten or fifteen minutes of shuffling before they get here. Let’s go.”

  A half-hour later, Carl Bergen was banging on the front door. Dexter stepped onto the front porch and looked where Carl was pointing: the front gate. Carl and his wife were both in their mid-fifties and had been living in a “fifty and over” community when the plague had struck. Carl had been the assistant manager of a branch of the state-owned liquor stores and his wife Gail a housewife who had worked part-time in retail after their children had left the roost. Carl wasn’t in the best physical shape and his wife was even worse off, although they were both leaner than they had been before winter had set in and began thinning them out. Carl had been very vocal about wanting to leave the neighborhood because he felt it was too exposed, and the others seemed to be moving toward his opinion.

  “There’s at least a hundred of them there pushing up against the gate, Dex, we have to go down and start taking them out.”

  Dexter nodded. It was almost dark. There were only a few minutes of light left.

  “We have to go now, Dex. There’s no way to know how strong that gate really is. It was
only ever meant as a visual deterrent.”

  “I know, I know. Get the other men out with the spears and stuff and we’ll go down and do what we can.”

  “Everyone’s already ready,” Carl said.

  “You and the others get down to the gate, I’ll be there in a sec,” Dexter said, turning back into the house and closing the door behind him. “Honey!”

  He rushed through the house into the living room and picked up his rifle, quickly slinging it over his back. He strapped his machete to his hip and picked up the spear he had crafted in the fall. “Honey!”

  “What is it?”

  “We have a hundred or more dead ones at the gate, pushing on it, and the rest of the guys and I are going to down there and try and hack them down as best as we can. Get the kids ready for a run and have the backpacks filled with some supplies in case we have to get out of here.”

  Carly stared at him aghast. “Is it that bad?”

  “Not yet, but it’s better to be ready to split,” Dexter said, picking up his pistol and sliding the holster onto his belt. He pulled a knit cap on, shrugged into his winter coat and headed for the gate, the other men already there, chopping and stabbing the undead.

  Alongside Carl, Jeff hacked at the outstretched hands of the zombies with a fire axe while Peter poked at them with a re-purposed rake handle, the tip filed into a sharp point and hardened by fire. Dexter strode up and shoved his spear tip through the eye socket of a formerly middle-aged woman with a bob haircut, the flesh on her right cheek peeling off and exposing her blackened molars. After ten minutes, the pile of now-dead undead bodies at the foot of the gate had made it impossible for the rest to get at the gate, and the zombies growled and murmured from a few feet away, occasionally falling onto the pile of their fallen friends and struggling back up.

  “Well, I hadn’t expected that,” Peter said as he stepped back from the gate and looked around at the horde on the other side.

  “What’s that?” Jeff asked.

  “That we’d reinforce the gate with their bodies.”

  Dexter watched with curiosity as one of the dead separated from the horde and began turning its head across the four men as if it were sizing them up, an undead man who resembled a skeleton in a deteriorating business suit. Just in case, Dexter turned around and scanned the cul-de-sac behind them, wondering what the zombie might be trying to figure out. What could it figure out? It was a … reanimated corpse.

  “Now, what?” Carl asked as he back stepped away from the fence, his eyes on the walking dead.

  A few minutes later, Dexter drove a Lincoln TownCar down the lane and parallel parked it so that the passenger side was only an inch from the gate. It had been left in the garage by whoever had owned the house before he and Carly had taken it over (a fortyish couple with two boys and a girl, judging from the the photos on the walls in the living room). He turned the car off but left the key in the ignition and popped the door open.

  “Someone’s going to have to watch the gate all night, so we’ll have to take shifts,” Dexter said. “I’ll take first watch until ten. Jeff, you go from then till two, Pete next until four, then Carl until dawn, when we’ll all be up. If they’re still here in the morning, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  For the next few hours, Dexter watched out the window of the house closest to the gate, a house none of them lived in because it was so close. He shivered inside his clothing and wished for an electric heater. Or, a propane one. Anything to warm the bedroom of the teenager who had lived in here before the apocalypse. He looked around the room at the video game posters on the walls, the sports trophies atop the bureau: a boy had lived here.

  He looked back out the window and brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes: the horde had grown. He caught his breath. He scanned the perimeter to either side of the gate and saw scores more of the undead pressed up against the wall, knee-deep in snow. The undead knew there was living on the other side, and they were hungry for flesh. For a moment, Dexter wished he still smoked, wished there were cigarettes to smoke or, even, that he had some of the nicotine gum he had used to quit smoking after Carly had gotten pregnant with Ben and forced him to quit. He had hated the gum - and Carly, for a while. He had liked smoking. His grandfather had smoked cigarettes his entire life and died from old age, and Dexter had always considered the anti-smoking stuff nothing more than the stuff anti-smokers promoted. Not everyone died from smoking. Not even most people. But everyone died, and in the new world, some who did returned as undead. Probably even the boy who had lived in the room.

  He heard the front door open and close, followed by steady footfalls up the steps. He turned over his shoulder and watched Jeff as he walked into the room dressed in a camouflage hunting suit, thick wool cap and carrying his hunting rifle. Jeff shook his head slightly in disbelief that they had to do this yet again.

  “I’m down to twenty-seven rifle rounds and a box of ammo for my pistol,” he said as he walked up to the window and looked through it at the silhouettes of zombies at the gate. “We aren’t gonna be able to stay here too much longer if they keep following one of us back after a day out. I need the ammo to hunt, not kill these fuckers.”

  “Yup.”

  Jeff had been a medical sales representative before the collapse of civilization, and he and his wife Danielle had lost one of their children in the mass exodus out of the city on I-79. The highway had become clogged with cars heading toward Pittsburgh and nobody had gotten anywhere when a zombie horde moving south startled everyone out of their cars in panic. Their eight-year old daughter had gotten lost in the crowd after stumbling and losing her grip on his hand, and the zombies were everywhere too quickly for him to spend more than a few moments trying to find her. He hated himself, still, for having run after his wife and twelve-year old son, leaving his little girl behind so he could save his own skin.

  “Whaddaya think we should do? We aren’t going to be able to put up any additional barricades during the winter, not with all this snow,” Jeff said.

  “I dunno. I think a couple of us should maybe hit up 84 Lumber and see if we can’t find some more fencing and posts or something and build up the perimeter a little bit more. So we have to shovel some snow, nothing new there,” Dexter said. “We almost kinda have a good thing going here.”

  “Yeah, almost,” Jeff said. “As long as they don’t surround the whole place and keep us penned in.”

  “Yup.”

  “This is the third time in two months we’ve had a horde of ‘em pressed up against the gate, Dex. I’m not sure we’re going to get very many more before some group manages to push through it, and then we’re stuck in here like fish in a barrel.”

  Dexter nodded, trying to be diplomatic in understanding Jeff’s point, and said, “It’s the middle of winter and we’ve got a bunch of kids to deal with. Getting out of here now would be an immense logistical nightmare: there’s snow everywhere, no roads are plowed, finding gasoline for the vehicles would take up too much time and none of us has much more than a few days of food, which we’d have to use because we couldn’t hunt if we were on the move.

  “And it’s not like it’s not like this everywhere else out there. You were out there before you were here, you know that. There isn’t a safe place on this planet that any of us know about. If we sit here until the weather breaks, we’ll have a better chance.”

  Jeff nodded. It was the same old argument, just distilled.

  “You get anything today on the lake?” Jeff asked.

  “Some walleye. You?”

  “A pair of geese that thought I was going to feed them bread.”

  Dexter smiled. “I’m so sick of goose.”

  “You and me both, but there’s lots of ‘em and they’re easy to catch.”

  Dexter handed the binoculars to Jeff and nodded. “See you in the morning.”

  Dexter unsheathed his machete before opening the door and stepped out on the porch, scanning the neighborhood for any undead that might have fou
nd their way in. Until the horde left - usually after a half-day or so of having nothing to eat - he and the others were stuck inside with no exit. And no food.

  He made his way quickly to his house and slipped inside, locking the door behind him. The fire in the fireplace was almost out, and his wife and kids were asleep in sleeping bags on the floor near it. He threw a couple of logs on, stoked the coals and retrieved the bottle of whisky he’d found in the original owner’s liquor cabinet and poured an inch into a rocks glass. He sat back on the couch and felt the growing heat of the fire roll over him. He glanced at the 50-inch flat screen and wished it still worked, and, for a moment, wished everything were back to the way it had been.

  But, as back then, he was still happy that he at least had his family at the end of the day. Only now, more so. He treasured his time with his wife and kids despite the risk to his life he took every day, and he had noticed that his relationship with Carly had changed during the course of the last year, with her yielding to his decisions, trusting him more, and … loving him more. His life had felt almost hollow before the zombies had forced him to be more than just half of a parental unit, with both he and his wife heading out to their jobs everyday. Now that she tended to the needs of the family at home every day, and he ventured out for sustenance, she seemed more at ease, more loving toward him.

  Dexter awoke to banging on the front door, a staccato of slamming devoid of a beat. He sat up quickly and grabbed his rifle while the rest of his family stirred. Carly stared at him.

  “Lemme see what it is.”

  He walked quickly to the front door and found Peter on the other side, covered in the blood of the dead.

  “We gotta get out of here, now,” Peter said, his voice measured panic. “There’s more dead ones at the gate, and they’re pushing it open, moving the car back.”

  Dexter glanced over at the gate: there were more of the undead, hundreds more.

  “And Carl’s gone. So is his wife.”

  “What do you mean, ‘gone,’” Dexter asked, stepping out onto the porch and looking at the horde as it pushed against the gate.

  “He never came to relieve me last night, so I just figured he must not have woken up, so I waited for sun-up and then went and checked on him, and they were gone.”

  “You gotta be shitting me,” Dexter said softly. He looked over at the gate and saw that it had been opened about a foot, the chain stretched to maximum. The car had been moved sideways about six inches, but if the horde was capable of that in eight hours, it was only a matter of time until the hinges on the gate were pulled loose and the car pushed farther in. A day? Two days?

  “Let me put my boots on and get dressed,” Dexter said. “Get Jeff and meet me out front in ten.”

  Dexter walked back into the house and looked at his family as they huddled around the fireplace. They were all he had, and he really didn’t have them if he couldn’t keep them safe. And he couldn’t keep them safe, not really, not forever. Not when half the world was against you and organized to kill you and your half was always hiding.

  “Well?” Carly asked.

  “Same old, same old. There’s a couple hundred undead pushing at the gate and we gotta figure out how to stop them, again,” Dexter said.

  “You’ll do it baby, you always do.”

  Dexter smiled but didn’t feel it inside. Had Carl gone to relieve Peter and seen something to change his mind about the compound? What could he have seen that would cause him and his wife to flee in the middle of the night, in the dead of winter, on foot? He pulled on his boots and clipped his holster to his belt. He might only be able to kill twenty of them, but that would be twenty less he’d have to deal with later.

  “I gotta go,” he said, and left.

  Out by the gate, the undead were a teeming mass of outstretched arms and drooling mouths. They saw food - Dexter, Peter and Jeff - and wanted it.

  “We chop what we can and shoot what we must,” Dexter said, “But don’t waste your ammo on them. Save enough in case we need to get out of here over the back fence.”

  Peter and Jeff exchanged quick glances.

  “What?”

  “Pete and I were talking about it earlier and think maybe now’s the time to get the hell out of here,” Jeff said. “We’ve got two toboggans we can load with supplies and pull so we don’t leave everything behind. If we get out of here by noon, we’ll have five or six hours of daylight to find someplace to hunker down in for the night.”

  Dexter flitted his eyes between the two men. “I got two little kids, not teenagers like you two. We’d be lucky to get a couple of miles in that time through this snow. And it’s not like these are the only undead around. We’ve all barricaded the houses so that they can’t get inside, and, in the past, they’ve usually only stayed around for a few hours when there was nobody outside for them to see.

  “I think we’re better off killing what we can and reinforcing the gate. Push the car back up against it, maybe pile some furniture or stuff between the car and the fence to make it harder for them to push against it. Then we head into our houses and wait it out.”

  “We keep doing that, Dex, and they keep coming back. One day, they’re going to get through,” Peter said. “We might be better off trying to find a new place.”

  Dexter nodded. “I know, I get that, Pete. But it’s the middle of winter and we’ve got a reasonably secure place here. Every time one of us goes out there, we take a huge risk. These things are everywhere. And it’s not only them you have to worry about. How many times have we had to fend off other groups of people, living people, who are desperate for anything and willing to kill for it? Kill living people like us for what we have: ammo, a few cans of food, whatever. We know each other, we trust each other. You go out there and you’re rolling dice with some pretty long odds.”

  A few hours later, Dexter watched as Jeff’s and Peter’s families left the compound, each man pulling a toboggan behind him, their sons holding their rifles. Peter turned after a dozen yards through the snow and waved at Dexter, and Dexter waved back, knowing he would never see any of them again. But he felt nothing inside himself for their leaving, no grief or regret or desire for them to change their minds and come back. They hadn’t been friends, merely “co-survivors,” and they could do whatever they wanted to try to survive.

  He got into the Bronco, started it up and drove down the street to the front gate, settling the bumper into the side of the TownCar. He set the parking brake and then walked around to the back of the truck and placed a chock block behind one of the rear wheels. He looked at the undead on the other side of the gate and watched as they seethed, all of their eyes fixated on him. And then he watched the zombie in the business suit from the night before creep out from the group and start looking around, scanning the area. He’d seen this behavior before but never thought twice about it. But now, it seemed different. Coordinated. He got out of the truck and walked up to wall, pulling his pistol from its holster and looking through the rest of the horde, trying to figure out if anything was afoot. The horde simply stared at him and pressed against the barricade.

  Dexter turned his attention back to the lone zombie in the business suit, its hair long gone, the skin atop the skull stretched thin and revealing the bone of the skull beneath. It should be dead, long dead, as no human could live so frail and thin, but it stared at him and managed something akin to a snarl, drool trickling out of it’s mouth. It knew it had him, Dexter thought as he watched it. It knew it had won. Dexter raised his pistol, aimed down the sights, and squeezed. The zombie’s head split open like a cantaloupe and the body collapsed in a heap. Like so many others before it. He turned and looked at the horde and nothing had changed. He shrugged inwardly and walked back to his house.

  “How’d it go?” Carly asked as he sat down on a bench in the foyer and pulled his boots off.

  “About as well as you’d expect, I guess. We’ll see if it holds.”

  “I can’t believe the others left us,”
Carly said, her voice low and almost mad. The last year had taught them not to mourn for long the loss of a friend. Getting to know someone was a risk not to be taken lightly.

  Dexter made a small “what can you do?” gesture with his hands and gave her a small smile of understanding.

  “Let’s get to the bedroom,” he said after a long moment, giving her a small wink and a smile. “We might have an interesting day ahead of us.”

  The first rays of light broke through the eastern window of the bedroom and woke Dexter up, as usual. He slipped out of the warmth of the bed and into the bone-chilling cold of the bedroom, the fire downstairs long out. He dressed quickly and headed downstairs and noticed his son stacking wood into the fireplace.

  “You’re up early,” Dexter said.

  “I had to go the bathroom,” Ben said over his shoulder.

  Dexter crossed the room to the bay window and parted the curtains a half inch, peeking through them down the road at the front gate.

  Which was deserted.

  “What the?”

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “They’re gone already.”

  “The undead?”

  “Yeah.”

  Outside, Dexter held his rifle at the ready as he approached the gate, the sky above blue and devoid of clouds. He puffed out clouds of air as he crunched through the snow, listening through the snow-silenced stillness of the world for the sounds of the undead. Nothing. The snow on the other side of the gate had been trampled down and turned into mud that had frozen solid overnight, and only the bodies of those they’d killed the day before remained. He walked the perimeter around the twenty-three homes in the gated community and found nothing on the other side but leafless trees and snow. What had he missed while he slept through it all?

  And then, for the first time in weeks, he saw a deer in the woods. A hundred yards off, standing still. He raised the rifle and looked through the scope at the animal, a young buck with maybe three points. He lifted his head up and scanned the surrounding area, again, looking for undead walkers, and saw nothing. He sighted the animal again, paused, and remembered his rule about creating loud noises in the compound. Then, he squeezed the trigger.

  The animal fell over. Then got onto its feet and stumbled about, taking steps this way and that before heading deeper into the woods. A second shot would take it down, but would be unwise if there were dead nearby. One shot was difficult to trace an origin point, but two shots could confirm a direction. He lowered the rifle and headed to the house. He’d track it down later in the day, when he was equipped to clean it. Right now, it was time to lay low and wait the situation out.

  “I heard a shot,” Carly said as Dexter sat down and pulled off his boots.

  “Saw a deer.”

  “A deer?”

  “I know, first one in almost two months. I had to take the shot.”

  “I noticed the dead aren’t at the gate anymore.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Think they’ll come back?”

  “Yeah. They always do.”

  Carly almost laughed. “No, I mean Pete and Jeff and their families.”

  Dexter walked over to the fireplace and turned his back to it, feeling the heat flow across his back. “No, we’ll never see them again.”

  ***

  THEN CAIN TURNED ON ABEL