I followed him. “Why? What did he find?”
Tommy shook his head. “Charlie found three bodies down there, two of them children, the third likely a teenager. All of them had been killed, none of them infected.”
I felt a familiar rage starting to build, frustrated that I had no one to vent it on. I headed downstairs and stopped at the landing. Tommy bumped into me. “What’s going on?”
I pointed at a portrait on the wall. “If there was a family here and they have been all killed, then we’re one short.” The family photo showed four children, two teenagers and two kids under twelve.
Tommy looked thoughtful and we mulled that one over in silence as Charlie came up the stairs. He was holding a small hatchet which was covered in dried blood, which he held up to us.
“I’m guessing this was what killed the kids in the basement. Came from a McCard's home store.” Charlie said without preamble.
“We’re missing one.” Tommy said, pointing to the wall portraits.
Charlie’s eyes narrowed and he looked at me. “Parents?”
“Dead upstairs.” I replied. “Mom worked over pretty badly, looks like Dad was forced to watch.”
“What do you want to do here?” Charlie asked.
I looked around. As nice as this place was, it was a tomb. “Light it up.”
Tommy and Charlie nodded and went to work. Twenty minutes later, we were driving away. In the rear view mirrors, I could see flames starting to lick at the edges of the windows. Rest in peace. I thought darkly.
We pulled into the outskirts of Leport and immediately could see that there was something wrong. The first subdivision had another pile of headless zombies, and all of the houses had been broken into. We split up and checked a few houses each. I found a few corpses in a couple houses, and none of them had been infected when they were killed. Charlie and Tommy reported finding similar things. The three of us looked at each other and it was pretty clear what we all thinking. There was a group out there that was not only killing zombies, but killing survivors as well.
We got back into the truck and proceeded into the city proper. Devastation was all around us, and we had a difficult time navigating around some of the blocked intersections. Many of the homes had been burned to the ground, and large swaths of devastation covered much of the town. We passed a grocery store but didn’t even bother looking in, as the doors had been smashed in long ago. We headed down the hill towards the river, and could see from the top of the hill the line of cars that choked the road and doomed many people to the rampaging dead.
Turning down the side road to the older part of town, we parked the truck and got out. There were several streets but oddly there were no cars. I wondered if they were on the road above us but was shaken out of my reflection by Tommy jostling my arm.
“Look over there” he said, pointing to the river.
I looked and smiled back at him. A small marina was tucked up next to the river, and a boat landing was evident. There weren’t any boats, and I hadn’t expected any, but we had our waterway access. Looking back to the town, I realized that the older homes and businesses had been spared the devastation, and the newer part of the town up the hill had been destroyed. A cathedral was still standing, as well as a large school. Either would make a good defensive point if necessary, and the bell tower was perfect as a watchtower. The lands around would do nicely for farming and raising animals, if we ever found any, and the woods would provide shelter and materials.
All right, then. I waved Charlie and Tommy over and we spent the next two hours going through businesses and houses. We found no survivors, but we did find quite a few zombies frozen in the snow and ice. We dispatched all that we found, fifty-six total. We found signs of violence here and there, but this part of the city seemed to be mostly abandoned. Charlie found a child’s clothing store, and came out with armloads of clothes for little Julia. Tommy checked every bar he found, but there wasn’t a drop of liquor in the town. I happened across a construction company and found a back hoe and a bulldozer, which would be useful later if we could get them running.
Getting back in the truck, we headed back to the condo complex. Our mood was sobered when we passed the burning mansion but lightened as we came within sight of our condo complex. I wouldn’t call it a good day, but it was productive.
Sarah and Jake met me and I told Sarah about the mansion and what we had found and what had occurred. She looked thoughtful for a second, and then asked, “Do you think there might be a connection between this incident and the one you had at the drugstore last year?”
I thought about it and realized that was what had been nagging at my mind when I came across the scene. “Now that you mention it, it does seem similar. I guess it would be too much to hope for that I had stopped them back then, wouldn’t it.?”
Sarah nodded and handed me a hot cup of coffee. “Nate called in and wanted to know how things were going. I told him you would get back to him later tonight.”
I sipped the coffee and nodded. “I made it to the river today.”
Sarah suddenly smiled. “You did! I knew you would! How did the town look?”
I turned serious. “There’s a lot of work to do, but it will serve. It most certainly will.” I spent the next hour talking about what we had found and what we were going to do before Jake demanded to be fed and played with. Duty called.
30
The next month was a whirlwind of activity as we cleared the town of Leport and started to move ourselves in that direction. I decided to use the big school on the hill as a temporary base, as it provided the best source of protection in case of attack. We had found several more homes that had shown signs of violence, and many individuals who had died of gunshot wounds, not infection. We found a large population of zombies in the upper west neighborhood, and Duncan concluded that these must have come from the freeway that was near that area. We killed them all, and dumped them in houses that we set on fire. By the middle of February, we had cleared the area around the old part of town and were just about ready to start our move.
Charlie had come up with an interesting idea. He had found a chain link dog pen around four feet by six feet by six feet tall. He secured it to the ground using some tent pegs and chain, and disappeared for the day. When he came back, he surprised all of us by dragging and tossing in the cage a zombie popsicle that hadn’t been neutralized yet.
When I asked him about it he just shrugged. “I figure the best way to know when these things are thawing out and moving again would be to have one nearby and when it starts to get active, that’s when we know the rest are likely active as well and had better be ready once again.”
I just shook my head once again at what Charlie called ‘country-boy-brilliance’ and let it go. I did call Nate and tell him about it and was rewarded with just one word. Nate then said he would be heading out to do just the same thing in the morning. I also told Nate about what we were finding, and he said he had begun to find similar things to the south. I started to wonder if perhaps there was a group operating right in between us, but I didn’t have the resources to go checking thoroughly. Any group that could behead as many zombies as we had seen was one to use caution with.
March brought warming weather, and keeping an eye on our imprisoned friend, we started to see increased activity. At around thirty degrees, our pet Z’s movements were slow, but definitely dangerous in a swarm. At forty degrees, the movements became faster, and on a particularly warm day, one of those rare sixty degree days we sometimes saw in March, our zombie friend was moving quite well and seemed back to normal.
About the second week in March I decided that the threat was real enough, the zombies were able to revive after being frozen, and we needed to be on the lookout once again. The areas around us had been cleared and could be counted on to be relatively safe, but after three months of being frozen, I figured the little critters were going to be hungry as hell and would be on the roam worse than they had been before. I warned my people to be as on guard as they had ever been, even with areas that had been cleared; if there was any chance a zombie could have gotten in, treat it as a hostile environment.
