The Zombie Theories (Book 3): Conversion Theory Page 21

  “Last mag,” Alvarez said and slammed it home. The bass boom of Ship’s .308 stopped and I saw him draw his Sig.

  Remo dropped his pack. He had kept it when we had put our shit down a couple of minutes ago. “Alright, it’s time to run!”

  We fled to the north, the way the horses had gone. They were well past the line now, having broken through, and Matt was shooting back into the crowd. A couple of stragglers had reversed direction and hunted the horses and their riders, but most were still coming at us. When we were ten feet from the first of them, I gave a full auto blast to try to make a hole to run through. Everybody else followed suit, firing whatever weapon they had loaded, and soon, there was a passage through the infected that was closing as I saw it. Dusty weaved through reaching hands, one of which closed around his fur. He reached back and bit the hand, tearing free and was through quickly.

  The trucks were in sight in front of us when we hit the wall. Ship used his machete to hack off the arm of a dead good-old-boy who reached for him. Remo let out a vicious kick which destroyed the knee of another rotting Texan. Tim fired point blank into the face of an emaciated young woman who was missing half of her throat. Alvarez used his rifle butt to push two attackers away. Remo and Donna got through with no problem, he telling her to run. One of them grabbed me, but I shook it off, firing into the faces of a couple more. Tim yelled and used his empty M9 to crush the eye socket of a dead young man. He raised his arm to slam it into the thing’s face again, but something grabbed his arm and pulled him off balance.

  They swarmed him before I could do a damn thing. He looked at me helplessly for the briefest of moments before they took him down. Ship decapitated one more creature before he grabbed me and lifted me like a child, pulling me away from Tim. The Sasquatch dragged me along through the hole we had created, Remo and Donna firing so close to us I swear I felt the rounds go past.

  The trucks reached us and they began firing into the crowd.

  “I can get him!” I screamed, trying to shake Ship off, but he was too strong for me by a longshot. He kept dragging me while I fought to get loose until I saw Donna. She was crying, and begging me to come with her.

  “Get in,” one of the men shouted. The other truck slammed on its brakes, skidding across the dust into the crowd, knocking five or six of the things back before the driver threw it in reverse. We piled into the back of both trucks, Ship helping me just to be sure I wouldn’t run back to help our friend. There was a huge pig-pile of infected in the place where Tim had fallen. They were fighting each other, the ones in the back trying to yank their brothers off the pile. I looked away and put my head down.

  “Save your ammo!” I heard one of the newcomers yell. “There’s too many!” I was sitting in the bed of a black F350 and I tumbled backwards when the driver threw it in gear. Ship righted me, keeping his hand on my shoulder and giving it a quick squeeze. I put my hand on his and looked at him, nodding and wiping my eyes. I was appreciative of the consolation. If you think, Dear Reader, that this was unmanly, then you can kiss my ass.

  The trucks caught up to the horses in no time, and we transferred the kids over. “Where’s Tim?” Kat demanded instantly. She was in the other truck, but I heard her plain as day. “Where’s Tim!” she shouted when nobody answered her. Donna hugged her and half our group was soon in tears.

  “Matt, you and Stacy head back toward Ray-ville,” one of the newcomers advised. “Circle around, hit the creek, and follow it for half a mile before you turn northwest. Check in every fifteen minutes.”

  Both riders nodded, turned their mounts back the way we had come, and galloped off. The trucks turned around, and we headed over the scrub to the west. The line of dead was to our south, and we were on a parallel course back to Raymondville.

  Donna looked frightened. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re heading back toward town before we circle around, ma’am,” one of the gunmen said through the rear window of the vehicle. “We’ll throw off their scent ‘fore we head home.”

  We were almost to the town limits, just before the first buildings jutted out of the dirt, when the trucks stopped. The man that had told Matt and Stacy to ride off got out of our truck. He was tall, maybe six three, in his late forties, with short-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair. He was wearing a beat-up, blue baseball cap, jeans, and a Harley Davidson T-shirt. He put his arms on the sides of the vehicle and addressed us.

  “My name’s Deek Meeks. Deek is short for Deacon, and any jokes about the rhyming names I’ve heard before. Ship stood and stuck his hand, way, way down for Deek to shake. Mr. Meeks did what every single person in the universe does when they see Ship. He looked the corresponding way, way up, raised his eyebrows, opening his mouth a little in surprise. Considering Ship was standing in the back of a truck, he was now about nine feet tall, so he had to come down on his haunches to actually get a grip on Deek’s hand.

  “This is Ship,” I told him, “and this is how he says thank you.”

  “Y’all are welcome. Both for the ride and the accommodations you’re about to spend time in. I own a ranch called the Double Hoof a few miles from here. We’d love to have you, and if y’all agree to helpin’ out while you stay, you can stay for a while. It ain’t much, but it’s home.”

  I stuck my paw out for him to shake when he was done with Ship. “Thank you, Mr. Meeks.”

  “HAW! Ain’t nobody called me Mr. Meeks in more’n a year! Deek’ll do fine.”

  I nodded. “Deek then. Forgive us, we just lost a friend.”

  He looked down and then back at where the swarm was. They were heading in our direction as fast as their rotting legs would carry them. “I’m real sorry about your friend. Happens too much now; losing people. We can talk more when we get back to the Hoof. We’re gonna give the dead ones something to chase, then head on home. Hit it, Hank!”

  The horn on the F350 blared to life. Hank leaned on it for a solid minute, the driver of the Dodge Ram 2500 following suit. After twenty seconds, that shit was annoying, so most of us covered our ears. A couple of shamblers came from the town side, but the horn had been for the swarm. One of the guys from inside our truck passed Deek something, and he began to fiddle with it. He was winding up an old, double-bell alarm clock.

  “I set her for fifteen minutes from now. She’ll go off until something shuts her down, and them things is pretty dumb, so it might ring for an hour. That oughta do it. Saddle up!”

  He put the clock right in the center of the steaming hot road. The tick tock sound it made was crazy loud, and for the briefest of moments, I considered it would be impossible to sleep with that stupid antique next to me. Then my thoughts returned to Tim. Tim had worked for the NSA. He had brought communities together, travelled across an infected country with me, battled countless undead, and he had saved my life. He died in the Texas scrubland because some assholes had blown-up our house. I stared at the bed liner of the truck, thinking about how I would miss him, and how wrong it was that a man like that was dead when there were so many assholes still vertical. Anger set in, and I seethed until we reached our destination.

  Me Too

  It never ceases to amaze me what people are capable of when there are no rules and supplies have become difficult to obtain. From the good to the evil to the necessary, man will do what he must to survive. A copier repair man can become a zombie-slaying hero, while a police detective can turn into a serial killer unchecked. The propensity to build a safe haven for your family and then defend it, is paramount for those who can’t or refuse to run. The creations that I have seen people construct with scavenged materials is astonishing.

  The Double Hoof Ranch is 847 acres of beautiful green grass, Acacia, and Ash trees hidden in a shallow valley in the coastal Texas scrubland. The entire acreage is surrounded by a four-foot, barbed- wire fence that stretches as far as the eye can see in both directions. As you come up on the small gate that crosses the packed earth road, you can’t see any structures or even realize that there
is anything other than more scrub on the other side of the gate. One of our saviors exited our vehicle, opened the flimsy, wooden, barbed-wire gate, and closed it when we were through. I didn’t think that this gate or fence would stop a jackrabbit, let alone a swarm of infected dead former-humans.

  A half mile past the gate, there was a better wall. A ten-foot wide, five-foot deep trench had been dug as a dry moat of sorts. The earth that had been removed had been placed on the far side of the trench and sloped sharply backward. This was a fantastic barrier against the dead. A guard tower made of welded steel and stained planks stood behind and to the right of an interesting gate. The gate was one piece of steel, maybe ten feet across, which was attached to a payloader by chains. The machine lowered the steel into place as we approached the gate. It was a drawbridge, reminiscent of a castle, circa 1500 AD, and it was solid as fuck.

  The guys from the truck waved to the two gate guards as we passed, and we travelled along the dirt road for another mile or so. The path then began to slope downward sharply. At the crest of the long ramp, before we started into the valley proper, I could see there was a distinct geographic difference from the land surrounding this area. Where everything behind us was dry scrub, with small bushes and the occasional cactus (or dead guy), the land in front of us was lush and green. I could see a large pond to the right of several smaller structures and a massive barn. Forty foot trees on either side of the now-paved main road gave ample shade from the oppressive sun as we drove beneath them.

  We pulled into the cobbled driveway of a moderately sized stone and wood house with a non-functional, Mexican-style, round fountain out front, and began to file out of the trucks. The place was beautiful, with a red-tiled roof and big windows. All of the ground floor windows had rebar welded over them into metal frames, and I was thinking Ship would have trouble kicking in the front door when it opened and a small woman in an apron strolled out wiping her hands with a cloth.

  She looked to be about fifty, with silvery, shoulder-length hair, and she was just a tad on the portly side. She smiled and said, “Welcome.”

  The last cooked meal I had eaten, other than with an MRE heater, was linguine with freshly caught mahi-mahi when we were back on Atlantis. It had been delicious, and we had eaten it a few days ago, so I shouldn’t have been as hungry as I was. When the smell of cooking food wafted out that door and hit me on that cobbled driveway in east Texas, it almost brought me to my knees. Then I thought that Tim would have enjoyed the smell of the food we were about to eat, and I grew somber.

  The woman in the apron, who introduced herself as Kelly, shook each of our hands as we followed Deek and filed past her into the house. The smell intensified a zillionfold (relax, I know that isn’t a real word) when we entered into a big mud-room of sorts. My mouth began to water. Deek told us we could leave our stuff in the mud-room, and we left everything but our weapons.

  A girl of about twenty-five named Darcy, two guys in jeans, boots, and cowboy hats, Dix and Javier, and a medium-sized, rust-colored dog with the awesome name of Rusty, were in the great room of the house. Rusty and Dusty were instant best friends, and they trotted off to explore each other’s butts.

  We were invited to lunch, and to trade stories. You know ours, so I’ll skip it. Theirs was interesting enough.

  The Double Hoof had been a horse ranch, but had fallen on tough times in the past decade. Most of the staff had been laid off or had moved on, until only family and a couple of hands remained. Plague hits, a few of them die, they build the fortifications, gain a few more people, and live under constant threat like everyone else. There had been a couple of serious undead attacks, but the nature of Hidden Valley (yeah, like the old salad dressing) was that it was just that: Hidden. Nobody outside of a few people in the neighboring towns knew it was there, so no bad guys had shown up.

  The Double Hoof was home to thirteen people now, but thirteen was a damn small amount to constantly check the perimeter fencing.

  Another reason these folks were still alive was a natural, underground spring that fed the pond. They had abundant fresh water, and this was the reason the valley existed in the middle of nowhere, and also the reason Deek’s grandfather had built the ranch in this spot. They farmed and hunted inside and outside the barbed wire, but the moat and earth wall only surrounded a hundred or so acres of the ranch.

  “A hundred acres?” Donna asked Deek. “You dug a trench around a hundred acres?”

  Deek smiled a half smile. “Took two months. We got six machines, three of which we liberated from some road construction south of Ray-ville.”

  We heard a woman’s yell from the left, “Lunch is ready!”

  “Follow me,” Deek told us.

  We filed into a huge kitchen, with an equally huge wooden table in the center of it. The table was fifteen feet long, at least, and there were fourteen mismatched chairs surrounding it.

  A short, heavy girl with thin, auburn hair worked at the sink, her back to us. When she heard us all file in, she turned and made a funny run to Deek. “Daddy!”

  Deek smiled and caught the girl, “Hi, Kate! Didja miss me?”

  She nodded vigorously, and I noticed she had a wicked scar that split her hair above her left ear. She turned around and went back to work quickly. She looked to be in her early twenties, and she had Downs Syndrome. Deek pointed to the table and said, “Please,” indicating that we should sit down.

  We picked chairs and sat. It felt good. Kelly, Darcy, and Kate brought the food, while Dix set glasses filled with water from the sink about the table. I was amazed that their plumbing worked, but then I remembered the pond. Something equally amazing happened next: Dix opened a fully functional refrigerator, pulled the top door, and grabbed two trays of ice.

  “Solar and two wind turbines,” Deek commented, noticing our shock.

  We got to talking again as we ate the delicious chicken and rice. The water was so cold it would crack your teeth, and Dix added ice to it anyway. Deek sat at the head of the table with Kelly on one side, and Kate on the other. Kate’s eyes locked onto mine, and she would not look away. Her mouth opened in an O, and she openly stared.

  “Him too…” she said quietly. She looked at her father. “Him too!”

  He looked at her questioningly. “What’s that, Kate?”

  “Him too,” was all she would say.

  We finished the meal, everyone pitching in to clean up, then retired to the great room. A fire smoldered in the fireplace, and I thought that was odd considering it was a billion degrees outside.

  Kelly took Kate back into the kitchen, and Deek looked right at me, leaning forward and putting his elbows on his knees. “She’s not my daughter,” he said under his breath. “We were out at the road construction back about three months after the first dead started to walk.” Dix and Javier both nodded in agreement. “We were trying to start one of the backhoes and a small herd snuck up on us. Dix started shootin’ ‘em, and me, Mike, and Javi joined. There was, maybe, thirty of them, and we just shot ‘em all. I aimed at one of the last few, popped off a shot, and missed.” He sighed. “Mostly. The thing grabbed its head, fell down, and started to cry. The four of us couldn’t believe it. We were so shocked I almost got bit by one of ‘em that came up behind. She was standing in a group of them, moaning just like they were. That’s how I met Kate. She’s been here ever since.”

  I was thoughtful. “The dead don’t attack her?”

  “Nosir.” (Deek said it like it was one word, I swear.)

  I nodded. “Seen it before. The fast ones will go after her though, that I can tell you.”

  Deek raised his eyebrows and looked at his buddies. “Now that there? That’s pretty critical information. Thank you, son.”

  We chatted some more, and soon, it was time for bed. There were vacant rooms in one of the houses, formerly for ranch hands, and we stayed in there as a group. Alvarez stood watch until the wee hours, then Remo took over. First light came, and I woke up, looking over a sleeping Donn
a and out the window. I stretched, turned the other way, and looked right into the pointing index finger of Kate.

  “You too,” she said.

  I jumped a little, and it woke Donna, who jumped as well.

  Donna looked at me, then at Kate, “What’s this?”

  I stared at the girl as I answered, “I dunno.”

  There was no malicious intent in this kid, I could tell, but I have no idea what she wanted. She put her finger down, but still stood there. I got out of bed, put on my jeans, and took her hand. I opened the door and she followed me out. Remo was in a chair at the top of the stairs. He noticed us and shot to his feet.

  “How did she get in here?”

  “Damn fine lookout you are.” I shook my head in reproach and strode past him with her in tow. I smiled hugely, knowing that I could chuck this transgression in Remo’s face forever. Deek was on the other side of the front door when I opened it. His eyes went wide at the surprise, but he sighed in relief when he saw Kate.

  “Sorry, son. She does that.” He took her hand. “Katie, why don’t you come back to the house now?”

  It went like that for the next four days. Remo was on watch for three of them, and in each case, Kate was staring at me when I woke up. The first two days it was creepy, and on day three, I just smiled at her. On day four, I was on watch until sunup, then I went to bed to catch up on a little sleep. Donna came back from the bathroom down the hall a few minutes later and woke me. Kate was standing there. I had been asleep for five minutes.

  During those four days I mentioned above, we helped out around the ranch, repairing some fences, helping feed the twenty-eight horses in the massive barn, and working on some of the vehicles and the generators. We also went back to pick up the shit that we had left behind in the scrub. There were signs of the horde, trudge marks in the dirt and bits of nasty shit they leave behind, but the actual walkers were absent for now. Three of us took horses to get the ammo and supplies. Not having been on horseback in years, it was actually kind of fun for me. I got to talking with Remo and this guy Javier, who everyone called Javi. (Pronounced Have E for you dumbasses.) Remo and Javi had gotten into a conversation about guns. Remo had his Sig, and Javi had a .45 semi with an extended mag which he kept in a shoulder holster. On his hip, he had a beautiful, blued Colt .45 with a pearl-white handle. A single-action jobbie, which meant you had to pull the hammer back with your thumb to cock the weapon before you could pull the trigger.