Hunger Driven (Book 2): Fight the Hunger Read online

  Making a quick meal of canned stew reheated with my little multi-fuel one-burner stove, I wolfed down the bland contents and forced myself to sit still for a few minutes. Meditation was not my habit but in high stress situations, I simply found that taking the time to clear my thoughts actually worked to reduce my blood pressure. I knew this clean up job was going to be hard when I scouted the town, but I reminded myself I had plenty of food, water and ammo to see me through.

  After lunch, I took a few minutes to run a patch through each of the rifles and add a little lube to the mechanisms before starting on the painful job of reloading the empty magazines. I’d scavenged several different models of magazine reloaders, but the most effective method I’d found was still doing the job manually, one round at a time. That took forever, though, and the Butler Creek loaders worked almost as well, so I did about half of them using the device.

  Hell, nothing was 100% reliable and we were just shooting zombies. Not like I was trying to land the Space Shuttle or perform brain surgery. So I loaded up my mishmash of 20 and 25 round magazines and got back on the clock.

  At three p.m. on the nose, I saw the three red flares arc into the sky and suddenly I felt a thousand times more isolated than I did before. That was the signal the National Guard troops were finished evacuating the high school holdouts, those survivors who barricaded themselves into the main building and somehow managed to keep the dead out for all this time.

  The Colonel learned about the group last month after a scouting team got around to checking the main campus of the school. A sharp eyed soldier spotted the horde from a distance, still clamoring to get at the fresh meat inside. They broke off their planned approach and dropped back a bit to observe.

  Zombies didn’t that riled up about anything except the prospect of a meal, but the scouts could not get close enough to the barricades at the time to pass a message to the people trapped inside. Not on their first mission, anyway. A few days later, they came back with a plan. That project required a little bit of misdirection and a lot of guts on the part of the scouts, as they braved not only the zombies but potentially the survivors inside as well.

  Sometimes, people didn’t want to be rescued by the military. That could because they feared the troops were rogue, or because they had their own misdeeds to hide. I blame the media. Again, sometimes people watched too many zombie movies and they confuse fantasy with reality. The military wasn’t really there to claim control or steal their women. Or take their guns.

  Which is just stupid. As long as you are pointing your guns at the zombies, the Guard would gladly help you find more ammunition for your rifle. Heck, I still remember when I’d hit the roadblock south of Livingston, just a week after the First Wave struck and I’d lost my family. I had six other survivors crammed in my van, mostly folks from my old neighborhood and all armed to the teeth. All the guard asked was if we’d help them gun down the horde approaching from the town side.

  I was using just the two Ruger 10/22s from my personal collection at the time, alternating with my AR-15s, and one of the soldiers had been impressed with how I could make headshot kills so consistently with the little rifles. That’s how I first came to the Colonel’s attention, I think. Not that I am the best shot by any means. I just kept going and since I didn’t care if I lived or died at the time, I stood the line and kept killing zombies until the last one fell. It went down almost on top of me.

  The individual National Guardsmen had all suffered losses in their families, but Colonel Northcutt gave them, and us, something to work towards in clearing and salvaging to help the survivors. Now, if you start acting like a jackass and preying on other humans, then you have a problem with the Guard. And these days, nobody wants a problem with our soldiers, because they represented one of the only forces taking a stand against the dead. Plus, they will hang your ass if you get too far out of line.

  Martial Law is nothing to sneer at when troops existed to enforce the rules. And Colonel Northcutt wasn’t some power-mad despot. His rules basically ran to common sense and playing nice with each other. No murder, rape, or stealing from other survivors hit most of his high points. Really, the kinds of things you teach your child as a parent…

  I let that train of thought go, because the going further down that path hurt too much. I told myself to quit goofing off instead of getting back to work. Like the guys hanging around the break room fixing coffee they won’t drink after lunch. Delaying that inevitable return to the grind.

  Aim, squeeze. Aim, squeeze. The little Ruger rifles had almost no recoil and with the extended magazines I could maintain a steady rate of fire. The 22 Long Rifle caliber was not considered by most gun snobs to be a real “man stopper” round, but the zombie heads proved to be a bit softer than their human, living, counterparts and the 22 LR had several factors in its favor.

  First, it did the job. Yes, sometimes I had to use a second round but most times one shot to the grape took down the shambler. Second, 22 LR was light. I could run around with 5,000 rounds of it in a backpack and still get where I was going. Try that with 308 Winchester. Finally, the stuff was everywhere. At least here in Texas. If you salvaged a house and found only one type of ammo in a dresser or stashed in the garage, chances were it was 22 Long Rifle. Or some type of 12 gauge shotgun shell.

  After running six magazines through the rifle, I stopped and switched to the next one. Shooting out a barrel was next to impossible with a 22, which was another point in their favor, but barrels did heat up. Hence the multiple copies of the same rifle. All the magazines were interchangeable and I barely had to look up when swapping them out.

  As I kept up the firing, I finally noticed a few gaps in the throng. I was careful to drop zombies in groups, and well out from the store itself. I still worried about a ramp forming, and by shooting in groups of fifty or so and then moving over a bit I managed to create my own little “firebreaks” in the crowd. However, for every one I dropped, another seemed to wander up and join the party. I had anticipated another five hundred to wander their way here from the school, drawn by the shooting now that the chewy treats inside the confines of the campus were gone. What I was seeing looked like more than five hundred. Like maybe double or triple that figure.

  By five o’clock, I was beginning to tire and the late spring sun heating up the tar on the roof added another assault on my nose. As if the stink of so many thousands of slowly decaying corpses wasn’t bad enough. At least there was something I could do about the smell. Digging a paper mask out of my bag, I treated the material with a drop of dark liquid and donned the mask.

  Early on, I’d found a box of car deodorizers at a car detailing shop and discovered the scent used to freshen up vehicles helped cut the stench, a bit. This was not the scented hangers, mind you, but the industrial strength stuff. That one drop I used had to be diluted with water to cut the potency.

  I never used the stuff when salvaging, because the whiff of a decaying corpse might be all the warning I had the house was occupied by one of the unquiet dead. I knew a girl who called them that. We all had our own pet names, but inevitably we came back to using zombie, because it fit so well.

  Also, despite the calluses, my trigger finger was nearly raw under the gloves and gauze wrap I used. This was an occupational hazard, even though my hands were as callused as any lumberjack or stone mason, the constant motion wore away at the hardened tissues. I’d started off with hands as soft as a baby’s bottom, but after three months of doing this job I figured I had successfully weathered all the blisters I was ever going to get.

  Since I was taking a break anyway, I set aside the rifle I’d been using to let it cool and picked up the next one in line. Some shooters name their weapons, usually something ironic or sentimental, but for me they were just tools. I did number them, one to six, and used a little White-Out brush to write the number on top of the buttstock for identification.

  Picking up Number Four, I levered a fresh magazine in place and began my work once again. I e
mptied the magazine, dropping twenty-five for twenty-five that time, and removed the scope from my eye to gauge the crowd as I exchanged magazines. I didn’t like the way the mass of dead pressing up against the front of the store began to mound up, so I spent the next ten minutes building breaks in the parking lot and further back on the overrun highway.

  By dropping twenty or so zombies in a tight cluster and repeating the process as needed, I created “ripples” in the tide of the dead, forcing them to approach along corridors. Zombies took the path of least resistance, and by channeling the flow I could somewhat direct the dead. I did not want to choke off their approach to the store but I did want to create a bit of separation. This breathing space would then allow me to deal with the masses accumulated just below.

  Target selection and timing dictated I take slow, careful shots to break up the building pile of bodies creeping up the side of the building. Unlike what we learn from Hollywood, a gunshot does not usually blow a body backwards ten feet. Even if you shoot someone with a cannon, that just blows the body apart. I’ve seen what thirty millimeter cannon does to a zombie. A cloud of mist and some smaller pieces scattered about. Fifty caliber machine gun rounds just disassemble the corpse no matter where the round strikes, and the shock jellies the brain. Believe me, if I had access to an unlimited supply of fifty caliber ammo, that would be what I would use instead.

  So, in real life, not the movies, many things are way different than we would otherwise think. I know I learned a lot of otherwise esoteric facts from my time in the zombie apocalypse. For example, when shot in the head, a zombie, like a real live human, tends to fall forward, especially when shot in the head with a small, light round.

  The dead had no concept of personal space and would climb or crawl right over one of their less mobile brethren to reach a live person. As a rule, zombies made for poor climbers, but they could still crawl and claw their way up. Though clumsy individually, their movements were almost ant-like in their persistence. I feared if I looked closely, I might see some sort of organization taking shape. Not that such would happen, but because that would mean my mind had finally slipped those last few gears.

  Back on the job, I took advantage of the breaks in the approaching horde to cut down stragglers at the edges of the pile below me, and carefully peeled back more and more of the zombies. By catching them in the middle of taking one of their shuffling steps, I usually managed to get the now fully dead corpse to tumble back, instead or forward. This helped reduce the overall total in a pile and kept the hissing creatures from reaching critical mass, or more importantly, critical height.

  Focusing on the area right around the base of the pile, I dropped over a hundred zombies in the next five minutes and created another, final windrow of bodies nearly three feet high in a semi-circle. This barrier would only grow as I continued emptying magazines at a slower but still steady pace.

  The spring sunshine held steady for me and I killed zombies until about six in the afternoon before mentally punching out on the time clock and going off duty. This amounted to turning off the boombox stereo and changing out the batteries. I shuffled through the CDs and loaded a few new discs into the loading tray. If I had to listen to music blaring at me all day, I was going to pick my own soundtrack for the apocalypse. No elevator tunes and no Kanye. Otherwise, I had pretty wide open tastes.

  Then, I picked up a rifle and paced off one more circuit of the roof’s edge for an assessment. Using my binoculars, I scanned the distance in all directions.

  I saw no recent signs of survivors. Some of the buildings sported makeshift banners calling for help, but all looked ragged and timeworn. The paint or ink was faded and I tried not to think about how those people ended up dying. Was it from dehydration, malnutrition or simply being overrun by the relentless dead?

  On the good side, I managed to survive to quitting time for another day and I estimated the total taken down today to be at least 2,500. That was about the numbers tallied from the first day in Woodville, but instead of finishing up tomorrow, I estimated I still had at least two more days of killing to go. This horde still had to number well over five thousand, maybe as many as seven thousand.

  Based on our experiences in other towns, someone on the Colonel’s staff calculated I could expect see about half of the town’s population reanimated and roaming around outside. Not everybody reanimated, and not all zombies could manage to reach the streets. When I went scavenging, I still found many of the hungry dead tied up or otherwise restrained by family members. This was especially true in those chaotic early days, where false hope spread amongst the population regarding a cure. If a cure was ever found, for either the animated dead or the bitten, I never saw it.

  So, even with an estimated quarter of the world’s population going zed at about the same time, humanity might still have had a chance if the politicians hadn’t fed us that line of shit about a possible cure being in the works. There was no vaccine for this disease, and once you got it you were done. But, we waited too long to accept the truth staring at us with hazy gray eyes that seemed to radiate hunger.

  Shivering at my own overly dramatic internal dialogue, I looked back around me in the here-and-now. Well, I had the food and the ammo. What else was I going to do, anyway? Shrugging at my own silly question, I sat down and started loading magazines until it was too dark to see. Only then did I feel like getting something to eat and settling down for bed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I got right to work the next morning at 8 a.m. with a thinning operation intended to build up the piles further out from the building. Without the music going last night, the zombies tended to stop moving. Not so much freezing in place as assuming a holding pattern. They might move around in a random manner but generally staying within a few hundred feet of where they last perceived some stimulating event.

  This lack of perception, and their rapidly evaporating attention span, was one of our best defenses against the dead. Once we removed ourselves from their senses, they almost immediately lost interest in us as a meal. Only when we concentrated up in groups did their attention seem to linger, but I suspected this was because humans as a group were incapable of actually doing anything quietly.

  Because of the dense concentration of the dead in front of the store, I decided to try a little experiment and dug out some of my homemade firecrackers. Using long fuses and my trusty slingshot, I lofted a half dozen fake M80s far out into the parking lot.

  One of the small black powder bombs going off sounds like a 30-06 rifle being fired, so six exploding in rapid succession stirred up the dead horde as they tramped into the center of the kill zone. I focused on hitting the ones leaving the front of the store and laid down a new carpet of really dead corpses that humped up on the piles.

  I worked hard for over an hour, dropping target after target and keeping a wary eye out for any groups bunching up or converging. Even within a horde this size, smaller subunits could become tightly packed and almost merge into a single huge organism. In Houston, I’d witnessed what happened if a thousand zombies were to press on the brick wall or glass front of a building. They could collapse the structure and kill anyone trapped inside, or on top, as the case may be.

  In addition to my own vestigial sense of self preservation, Colonel Northcutt wanted as many of the buildings in town preserved. He would eventually dispatch work crews to erect a wall around the best preserved portion of the town and allow, or encourage, settlers to relocate. He’d done it successfully three times already, and Jasper would be one of the biggest settlements yet.

  Plus, Jasper would be a gold mine of supplies the Guard and civilians desperately needed. With a total population in the three existing Safe Zone enclaves exceeding ten thousand, food became an ongoing issue. Gardens were already going in everywhere and the few greenhouses had provided at least some fresh produce over the long winter. Still the bulk of the crops would not be ready for several months yet, so for now we salvaged.

  In addition to food, a
mmunition remained a highly sought after item, both as a medium of trade and for the more practical use of downing zombies. In a very real sense, ammunition was more valuable than just about any other commodity. The new paradigm for survival was three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without air, and three seconds without bullets.

  Fortunately for me, the military still used the .223 or 5.56x45mm rounds for their primary weapons. This was more due to the availability of the military style rifles and the accompanying magazines than anything else. Hundreds of millions of 5.56 rounds were no doubt used up in those first few desperate days and weeks of the outbreak as the military and police tried to get a foothold against the rising tide of the dead. I didn’t know much about those first few desperate weeks as I was fighting my own battles at the time. My own failures merely reflected the overall losses incurred by the military, or so I gathered.

  The ragtag conglomeration of Texas Army National Guard units comprising Colonel William Northcutt’s command still had enough ammunition to fight several major battles, but not much more after that. Given the tattered and makeshift supply and logistics structure of the military, I doubted the local command counted on getting much support in the future. The Colonel was desperate for more ammo for his M4 and M16 rifles, and that was one of the reasons he let me go about my business.

  At an average of 1.1 to 1.2 shots per kill, I could take out a respectable number of zombies without forcing the Colonel to dip into his own military stores. Also, by sitting still and bringing the zombies to me, I saved on fuel and transportation wear and tear. Allowing me nearly free rein to salvage in the towns I helped liberate seemed like a small price to pay. Especially since I usually ended up donating back most of what I took anyway. Other than keeping up my little homestead and acquiring some trade goods, what else did I need extras for?