Notes from the Edge

Notes from the Edge: Posted by Dell 3:36 am 09/28/2023

Misspent
youth: How I got beat up the first few times – And Old School
Mothers… When I was a kid there was no Internet, phones were barely
more than curiosities that not everyone could afford, and Jesus was
only in the second grade…

What I am up to…

Currently I am deciding about the Zombie Plagues books, whether I should or should not bring them back, presented here as a serial story. There are several years’ worth of stories of Bear, Billy, Pearl and Beth fighting the dead and living through the plagues. The series intersects with America the Dead in a few places some of the characters cross over into each series as well. Let me know what you think of the idea.

Misspent youth: How I got beat up the first few times – And Old School Mothers…

When I was a kid there was no Internet, phones were barely more than curiosities that not everyone could afford, and Jesus was only in the second grade. Uh, before God zaps me let me explain that that would be Jesus Santos whose parents had moved to Galveston where I went to school at Island Elementary, not the savior that died on the cross.

But, that brings up a point, why name the kid that? Wouldn’t you be a little concerned that some smart Alec like me would come along and say.. “Hey, are you that Jesus?” and “So, where are your disciples?”

Anyway, after Jesus punched me I realized that people with funny names can fight. And right after that I realized if you point that out to the person in casual conversation Jesus just might punch you again. I was not a smart child, a little brainy, but lacking common sense. What would have been great is if I could have taken Jesus through life with me to help me see those things. But no, not too long after that we moved to New York and I realized that people with funny accents tend to want to smack you when you point that out to them. And, not only that, they’ll turn it around on you and claim you have the accent because you came from Texas… I think I fought every day for the first few weeks.

But I fought. I didn’t call their cell phone and leave a nasty message. I didn’t leave a nasty note on their face book account, or hack it. That’s all I read about lately. That’s how it’s done. No face to face stuff. Of course, as I said we didn’t have Internet and phones were not for causal calls. I could see me picking up the phone and calling Jesus’s house…

“Oh… is this little Wendell? How is your mother?”

And that would have been the end of it right there. Small town. Maybe we had a half dozen phones, and everyone knew everyone. His mother would have recognized my voice, asked about my mother, and then what could I say? .. “Oh, she’s fine, and, by the way, Mrs. Santos, do you know if Jesus found his disciples yet?”

Even if I had done it I would have no more hung up the phone than Jesus’s Mom would have been on the phone to my mom. My mom would have hung up the phone and, as we used to say back then, My ass would have been grass. The shit would have hit the fan. Never mind ‘Wait until your Father gets home’ Moms were prepared to deal with you back then. They may have looked like lightweights… No tattoos or piercings, gym bodies or anything else. They were just tough no nonsense moms hanging out in the kitchen in their June Cleaver shifts baking Pot Roasts and Meatloaf, but they were tough. Truthfully, if you asked a group of old school mothers where Jimmy Hoffa is they could probably tell you. They were that tough.

“Do you know who that was?” She would ask me…

“Mother Mary?” See, once you start down the road of smartassery it’s hard to stop.

Have you ever eaten soap? I have. And, a conversation that made smart remarks about both Jesus and his mother would have been a soap eating offense.

But, we didn’t do those things, mainly because we didn’t have the technology and secondary to that any kids mother could put a foot in your butt back then. It was a federal law. I’m pretty sure. So, whatever you did it was coming back at you, so kids took care of things themselves.

The whole thing with Jesus taught me about emotion and how boys handle it. Taught me to duck a punch too. You would think it would teach me to shut up, but no. I decided that since I seemed to have a big mouth, and that teeth were made to last a lifetime, I had better learn how to fight. Somehow I decided in my head that learning how to fight would be easy. And then? Well, if I wanted to make smart remarks about Jesus and his little disciples I could. Of course the part of the equation I had missed was learning. I had to learn to fight and learning to fight meant getting punched in the face. So, not only was I still getting punched in the face I was volunteering to do it and I couldn’t even punch them back!

I think it was around my third time in an actual boxing match that I began to think it might be smarter to. One: Read about it first. Two: Try really hard to fall down with my face off to one side. Big noses break easy. Three: Find some other way to spend my Saturday instead of getting beat up.

After I woke up from my last fight I decided that Karate was probably smarter. I mean Kato was really cool. It looked so easy. That was great until I realized that not only would people be punching me in the face they would also be kicking me … In the face … Really hard… And anywhere else their feet could reach … Kids have bad aim. But, the good thing I learned was, it is really hard to break your eye… Either one of them. And, a point of fact, people with funny names can also kick box like crazy too. And a punch from a gloved hand or foot can still ring your bell. So if, let’s say the guys name was Frances, and he hated the name Frances, it might not be too smart to say things like ‘Frances Is A Sissy’ (Francis of Assisi ) damn Catholic school knowledge. Or do you know what Nun means? None for you and None for me! Ha Ha HA Ouch! My mouth is broken.

After awhile I learned to fight. Either that or all the kids with funny names or in Catholic school would have just continued to beat me up all through school and I couldn’t have that. And, I learned to fight when I realized I had a funny name too. Huh. You know I think kids can turn any name into a funny name. Gladys becomes Glad Ass, obviously if your last name is Kuntz you’re in for it. A kid in my class had that name. And a kid named Beeman… “Hey! Where’s your Bees Man?” Oh… We were so clever. And me. Sweet Meat … Sweety Pie, that one could always get me… Wendell became Window, and that got me. The Saurs lived a few doors down from us so that always got us too. Suddenly making jokes about Jesus wasn’t quite so funny.

So, I grew up and got a job as a writer. Now when I don’t like someone I just kill them off in a plot and then throw a disclaimer in the front of the book saying it wasn’t them. Piece of cake. And if I want to pick on someone’s name I let the characters do it for me. And, I never allow any of the characters to pick on my name. After all , they’re my characters.

Okay. I have to go. That whole Jimmy Hoffa thing has me curious. I have to go ask Mom about it!

 I will leave you with an episode of the Zombie Plagues to see if you like it, Dell.

 The Zombie Plagues are copyright renewed writerz.net Media, Wendell Sweet and A. L. Norton 2022 all rights reserved.

Parts of this work were originally published under a name construct (Pen Name) Geo Dell by Wendell G. Sweet Copyright 2012. This work is used here with permission and posted by the owner of the material.

PROLOGUE

  A meteorite that was supposed to miss the earth completely, hits and becomes the cap to a series of events that destroy the world as we know it. Police, fire, politicians, military, governments: All gone. Hopes, dreams, tomorrows: All buried in desperate struggle to survive.

  From L.A. To Manhattan the cities, governments have toppled and lawlessness is the rule.

  For a time the dead lay in the streets while gangs fought for control of what was left, and then the dead began to rise into some other sort of life. Small groups of the living begin to band together for safety and begin to leave the ravaged cities behind in search of a future that could once again hold promise. This is the story of the OutRunners and how they came to be…

August 4th

Plague Year One

Bear

We were down along the river checking over some old buildings that were perched on the cliffs there, high above the water. Fall was not far away and we knew we had to get moving, get out of this dead city. We had half the country to cross and find a place before winter came back around again.

We had left the others in our place off the park. An abandoned factory building I had found after I had lost Donita, and struck out looking for food earlier that morning. With the park and its crowds so near to us, the shops and small stores for blocks around us were stripped clean. Another reason to get out of the city. It was time. I remember thinking that as I walked along.

I was thinking back to March as I walked. Not really paying attention to the walk, where I was going… March… Just a few months ago, but the world was still the world then. And for the next little while we didn’t even know about the dead. Dead was still dead. When you closed your eyes for the long eternal sleep you didn’t wake up a short minute later as something else. No. We were ignorant up until they decided to come after us. Ignorant. Stupid. Didn’t know a thing: Have a clue.

I had been in Central Park a few days after the first earthquakes hit New York. I had left Donita alone and went down on my own to see what the deal was. I found out nothing. No one knew any more than anyone else. There was a lot of speculation, but that was it. There had been earthquakes. It had rained hard for nearly twenty-four hours straight. The really freaky stuff hadn’t happened yet. We were just starting down our new path, but what was clear was that thousands of people had died in the city, maybe more than thousands, maybe a million or more. And certainly millions if the damage here was the same across the country… Or, worldwide.

And my initial estimate turned out to be kind. In the city alone: Collapsed buildings: Fires; exposure to the elements because there was no shelter, there were millions of bodies. It was not so bad in those first few days, but a few days later when the smell of the dead rotting under the rubble began, it was horrible. The diseases started then too. And the diseases took thousands more, and we thought that was the end of it, but it was not. The dead came next. The same dead, newly risen to some other sort of life. But that day in Central Park I did not know about the dead yet. I had no idea what was ahead; what was before me was bad enough.

At six foot three and nearly two hundred ninety pounds I don’t usually fear much. But that day I did. I realized there are some things you had better fear if you have half a brain in your head. It didn’t matter that I could walk through Central Park unmolested. Something was on the wind. Something that didn’t care who it touched: Did not respect physical size.

I walked through the park. There were hundreds there already. In the coming days those same people began to make the park home. But that day they wandered aimlessly. In shock. The subway was shut down, most of it flooded. The buses parked. You could not find a cab. The same with the cops. Everything that was the same about the city. The things you could depend on to be the same day after day, were gone. A few short days and they were gone. No more. And it had a feeling of permanence to it. A feeling of doom.

I sat down on a bench and watched the people shuffle by. No noisy kids. No babies bawling. No Joggers. No dog walkers. Hopeless people shuffling by. The occasional panicked whack job running around crazily. I saw no one shot that day, but in the coming days, they, the hopeless ones, began to shoot the crazies. Chase them down and kill them. But that was later. That day I sat on the bench and wondered what had happened, and that was when the planes had overflown.

We all heard them from a long way off. Military cargo planes. Slow, sometimes seeming to hang in the sky. That droning sound as they overflew, blocking the sun from the sky. This was no fly over to see how New York was, that much was evident immediately.

I was torn between running, and needing to know what this was. Once you start down that path of just reacting to fear, it gets bad fast, so I sat there, as calm as I could be. ‘They will not drop bombs,’ was my thought. I remember it. And they didn’t. What they did was spray the entire city. Trails of blue-tinged vapor drifting down out of the sky. That was the first time.

I finally did give in to the fear and took off through the park, thinking, like nearly everyone else, that it must be some sort of poison. The government solution to whatever it was that was going on in the city.

We didn’t know what the blue shit the government planes sprayed us with right after everything went to hell was. And I am still not convinced I know all there is to know, but I suspect things. I have been told things. I met a guy a few weeks back that said he worked at the Army base over in Jersey. He said he knew what it was. He said the planes came from somewhere down south, but stopped there on the way back to re-fuel. What he told me was it was designed to strengthen us. Keep us alive a little longer. Make us stronger somehow. Some dip shit scientist’s idea.

I suppose it was meant as a boost for us. A help. The world slowed down, fell apart, everything stopped working. They knew they couldn’t get to us. We would die. So they sprayed the blue shit on us. And I could suppose further that some of us survived the first few months because of it. I can’t prove it, but I suspect it did help us evolve into…

I don’t know. Whatever the hell we are now. I know we’re alive? I know our hearts beat. I still feel human and I truly think I am still human: If it made changes to the living they are very small changes… At least so far.

But the dead. Oh the dead, that is a different story. It did something else to the dead.

I walked along now thinking my thoughts. I was lost in them, I’ll admit it. Right back in March for a few seconds. But I came back fast.

We were right in front of a line of cliffs that overhung the river, spread out a little, at least I was. It’s funny how you can forget to be careful so goddamn fast. It was somewhere past midday when they came for us.

“Bear! Bear!”

Cammy from a hundred yards down. The panic and fear in her voice made my heart leap into my throat, and because of her fear, and probably some of my own, I did a really stupid thing right then that cost me time. I was so panicked, that I threw my rifle down and sprinted toward the sound of her voice. I got maybe twenty feet when the realization of what I had done hit me. It would have been comical to see the way I locked my legs up and tried to turn around, before I had even come to a stop, if it had not been so goddamned serious.

I had the rifle back in my hands, the safety off, just a fraction of a second later when Cammy and Madison opened up on the UN-dead closing in on them from the mouth of the narrow trail that lead up from the river. I added my fire to theirs before I had run another fifty feet, and their leader, a shambling wreck of a corpse, folded up, and then flopped over the side of the trail and down into the river. I continued to run as I fired and I was shocked to realize that I was screaming at the top of my lungs as I closed in. I am big, but I can move when I have to.

“Goddamn-son-of-a-bitching-goddamn-bastards,dead-fuckers!” All strung together. Fear words. I did not hear them at first so I did not know when they started, and I could not shut them down once I did hear them, the panic and fear were just too hot.

I watched as, unseen by Cammy and Madison, a zombie crouched on a narrow path above them swiveled his rotting head to me, seemed to take my measure with a wide, yellowed grin, and then dropped from the ledge on to Madison’s back.

“No! Goddamn-son-of-a-bitches-dead-bastards-bastards!” I could not say, ‘Madison Look Out!’ Or speed up my feet or any other damn thing. Time had slowed, become elastic, strange, too clearly seen… The Zombie hit her hard, and she folded like an accordion: Driven into the ground, a few hundred pounds of animated corpse riding her down into the dirt. Clawed hands clutching, mouth already angling to bite… To taste her…

I was still thirty or more yards away. I could not see how that could even be possible. I should have been closer, but I was not. I saw Cammy turn, panicked, take her eyes off the other UN-dead, and start towards Madison. Unchallenged the other Zombies closed ground far faster than they should have been able to.

I saw the Zombie on Madison take a mouthful of her back, just below the curve of her neck, and rip the flesh away from her spine. Cammy’s rifle came up and barked, and the zombie blew apart, raining down on Madison, a storm of black blood. Somehow, I managed to switch to full auto, get my rifle up, and spray an entire one hundred round clip into the other zombies where they rushed along the path towards Cammy and the fallen Madison.

Madison screamed. Time leapt back into its proper frame and I found myself five feet away as Madison arched her back, screamed, and tried to stand. Blood ran in a perfect river from her gaping wound, across the white of her T-Shirt and down to the waist of her jeans.

“I think… I think…” Madison tried.

“Baby… Baby,” Cammy sobbed. She dropped to her knees and pulled Madison to her. “Oh, Baby… Baby,” Cammy sobbed.

I looked back up at the trail: Empty. At least of moving UN-dead. Three or four, it was hard to tell with the tangle of legs and arms, lay dead on the pathway. Silence descended. I heard a bird in the trees above calling as if nothing was wrong with the world. Cammy sobbing. Madison crying hysterically. The wind moaning through the empty buildings that were set just back from the cliffs and the river on this side of the city.

I was thinking… ‘That wind is colder. Colder even than when we started out this morning. Maybe the weather will turn back to snow and cold. Maybe winter is not done after all… Or coming sooner… It could be, it’s all so screwed up. Maybe, if it does get cold, it will slow those bastards down… Maybe we will be okay… My, God, they bit Madison… They BIT Madison!!!’ I sagged to the ground my mind full of confusion and numbness.

Cammy was sobbing uncontrollably, Madison had lapsed into shock. I was sitting crossed legged wondering where in Hell this would all end up, my rifle fallen from my hands and laying on the ground next to me. Time spun out: Dragged; seemed elastic once more, sticking in places and jumping ahead from those places to where it should have been had it continued to run properly.

Cammy sobbing, holding Madison up. Kissing her forehead. Telling her how much she loved her… How she was her world…

Madison… Eyes rolled back in her head… Face pale… Fine beads of sweat standing out on her forehead… Her back a bright slick of red, running across Cammy’s hands where she held her. Slowing… Slowing… Cammy mouthing words in such slow motion that I could not understand what she said… Madison’s body sagging, eyes rolled up to the whites… Bright dots of blood speckled across Cammy’s cheeks… Then time jumped, staggered, came back to normal and Cammy was screaming and screaming…

“No! … NO! … Not my… My love, my Madison, my…” Collapsing to the ground with Madison, crying still… Softer, but continuous.

“Cammy…” My voice, but I did not know it at first. I actually stopped speaking and looked around, startled, before I realized it was me speaking. I turned my attention back to Cammy. “Cammy… Cammy, it’ll be okay… It’ll be…”

“NO!….NO!” She scrambled backward, pulling Madison’s unconscious body with her. She wiped one hand across her eyes trying to stem the flow of tears… “NO! She’s… She’s okay… Okay… You can’t… You…” She broke down into sobs, pulled Madison to her and began dragging her away from me.

“Cammy… Cammy, it bit her… Bit her… Cammy… Cammy, it’s… It’s just you and me, Cammy… It bit her… It bit her…”

She let go of Madison and lunged for her rifle. I sat, still cross legged, stupidly, as she grabbed it and leveled it at me.

“Get out,” She said very calmly. Much more calmly than I thought she should have been capable of.

“Cammy… What are you doing… Cammy?”

“GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT!” She screamed. I reared back as the rifle barrel came up and then slashed down across my face. I jumped back, but not fast enough. The steel barrel smashed into my lower lip, through it and then hit my teeth. I immediately tasted blood and machine oil. My tongue ran across my teeth unconsciously. I was sure she had smashed them out, but the barrel edge had come up short or I had moved back far enough. One of those things.

The pain was delayed but it came never-the-less. Hard, heavy, fast, down into my lower jaw and then ricocheted back up into the top of my head. I scrambled backwards, tripped over my own rifle, got it into my hands and then time did that funny slowing, elastic thing again.

The blood dripped from my chin onto the ground. My rifle was pointed squarely at Cammy, safety off, and an empty clip, but Cammy didn’t know that. The blood dripped slowly. Cammy’s eyes swam in and out of focus, but remained on me. Her rifle barrel dipped and then rose again, leveled on me once more.

She seemed to take a deep breath that went on forever, and then, once more, time sped up. “I’ll kill you,” Cammy told me. “If you touch her, I’ll kill you… I will,” She started out strong, but ended in a doubtful, whining whisper.

I didn’t drop my rifle barrel but held one hand out in front of me in a placating gesture. “Not touching anyone… Not,” I managed through my busted lip and aching jaw. The pain was a live, throbbing thing.

“You will… But… I know you will… You think… You think…” She seemed all at once to realize that she no longer held Madison in her arms. She took a deep shuddering breath and then dropped her rifle to the ground. She collapsed back down to the ground and crawled to Madison’s body.

I stood. Shocked. Not knowing what to do. Time side slipped again. The bird went back to calling out; if it had ever stopped. The wind came back, blowing cold against my face, pushing the flush of heat that the situation had bought with it away, cooling the sweat on my brow. The bird called… Another picked it up and soon all the birds were talking as though nothing at all had happened. It became a perfect storm of noise after the deepness of the silence. Time slipped away again, clouds moving across the cold, blue of the sky.

Cammy sat, Madison pulled up into her lap, a large smear of maroon on her forehead, stroking Madison’s black hair. The birds called. The coldness of the wind seemed to bite at my bones. Nipping. Tasting: An UN-dead thing of its own.

I can’t tell you why I did it, but I am glad I did. I pushed the button on the rifle butt, dropped the empty clip in to my waiting palm, and slid another up into the rifle where it socketed itself home with a solid click. I did it perfectly. Like I had been doing it all of my life instead of just the last few months since the UN-dead disease, epidemic, disorder, plague, what-ever-the-fuck it is that has happened. She never looked up. The birds didn’t stop singing their birdsong… Just in case, I told myself. Just in case.

I stood, my knees screaming, flexed experimentally and then walked a short distance away, leaning up against the cliff face. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out my pouch and rolled a cigarette. I felt at my lips, busted up, but I would heal. I had been in fights in my old life where I had been busted up much worse. I lit the cigarette, held it carefully between my lips, smoking as I watched the clouds slip across the sky. Letting the urgency of the situation float away on the wind like the smoke was.

 Cammy’s voice had fallen to a barely audible whisper as she stroked Madison’s hair and held her. Madison’s lips, blue tinged, moved. Too quiet to hear her words. A private conversation. A private conversation in the wide open, which thanks to the UN-dead was a very private place. No one at all around, alive anyway, and the dead couldn’t care less about love, secrets, whispered promises, goodbyes. The UN-dead only cared about the hunger that drove them. Flesh, and more flesh… The time turned elastic once more and spun out of control for some unknown length. I only know that when I came back to myself the sun had moved across the sky. My thoughts were about darkness, zombies, staying alive.

When I think back on it now, I realize a noise had brought me back. Had to be, otherwise there was no reason for me to come back at all. Just stay gone. Let the sun go down and the UN-dead take the night, me, Cammy, Madison and whatever else they wanted. But it didn’t go that way…

A noise. A sliding foot. A pebble falling from above… I really don’t know. I know that this time I reacted fast. My rifle came up, my mind was clear. I focused; two of them dropping from the cliffs above… Like cats… Like dead, stinking, feral cats… Dragging that stink of death with them. The stench of rotted flesh falling from the sky, enveloping me even as I fired into them.

I had a choice. I couldn’t get them both. One falling at me, one falling at Cammy where she sat with Madison cradled in her arms, oblivious to everything around her. My reaction chose for me. The rifle came straight up and spat short, little barks of noise and flame. The Zombie started to come apart before it hit me. A shower of cold, dead blood rained down on me, splattered against my face. The body hit the barrel of the rifle and took me down to the ground clutching the rifle hard to keep from losing it as the full weight of the Zombie came down on it.

I kept it, but only by sheer determination. The Zombie had impaled herself onto the barrel. Her flesh so rotted that it had simply punched through her breast and out her back. I shoved her off as quickly as I could. One booted foot kicking against her chest. Knocking her apart, pulling the barrel back through the soft flesh and hard bone.

I expected to see Cammy done for. I expected to see her dead or dying, but she had somehow ended up about twenty feet from where the Zombie had fallen. She looked herself as if she had no real idea how that had happened, but when I raised my eyes and they took in the whole scene before them, I saw exactly how it had happened.

Madison must have still been awake. Laying there badly injured, but not gone. Taking the comfort from Cammy that she offered: When the Zombie fell she saw it and managed to push Cammy away from her and take the attack on herself.

The Zombie was no match for her, wounded though she was. She straddled the Zombie with a rock easily the size of her own head and bought it down hard. Once. Twice, and then I lost count, and the Zombie quit fighting. The UN-dead, dead again. This time for good.

The silence came back hard. Like a curtain on the last act of a play, just when the audience isn’t expecting it. It crashed down.

Time did it’s elastic trick and then snapped back before I was ready for it. My senses were shot. At first I could not connect the dots of memory that I needed to connect to make sense of what my eyes were seeing.

Cammy rose to shaky legs and started toward Madison, sobbing once more. Madison’s eyes swiveled to me. A sick look in them and pain riding there too. She slumped forward, one wrist flapping uselessly and lunged for the rifle that Cammy had, had trained on me not so long ago. Time stopped its elastic trickery right around that time. I knew exactly what she intended to do before she did it.

Cammy stopped in mid stride and nearly fell backwards at the effort of stopping so quickly. I think she believed for a second that Madison intended to shoot her. I really believe she thought that. But that was not the plan, and I knew that was not the plan. Because the plan that had resurfaced in her mind was the one we had talked about, half seriously, half jokingly, for as long as we had been traveling together. Before she followed through on that plan I heard her tell it to me in my mind once again, the way she had a week or so before. When she had been unmolested… Whole… Not about to join the ranks of the UN-dead herself.

“If I ever fuckin’ have to, I won’t hesitate,” Madison had said, “Once I’m dead I don’t want to come back.” She shuddered and grimaced at the same time.

We had been in an old house over in Harlem. That was before Harlem got crazy too. We had had gas lanterns for light. The windows were boarded over. The UN-dead scratched and cried and pleaded, but they could not get in. The four of us-John had still been alive then, in fact he had died just a few hours later… Fell through a rotted section of floor in that same old house… Impaled himself on a pipe in the basement… Madison had shot him in the head nearly as soon as he had stopped his struggles.

“He would have expected it,” she had said, and nothing more. But that night… That night she had said it right out. Like a mantra. Like looking into the future and seeing this day.

“If they come for me? If they get me? I’ll put a bullet in my own head. I will. I swear I will. If I ever fuckin’ have to, I won’t hesitate,” Madison had said, “Once I’m dead I don’t want to come back.”

And Cammy had begun to cry. “Don’t say it, Maddie… Don’t say it.” And she hadn’t said it again, but it didn’t matter. She had already spoke it into truth. I had heard it. I had heard it and I knew she meant it.

And now… Time stopped it’s trick. She jammed the rifle under her chin and squeezed the trigger… Her head exploded in a spray of red and gray. I swear I could hear the sounds of small bits of bone and drops of blood pattering down to the ground. And then the silence was roaring again.

I took a breath, another… And then Cammy began to scream once more…

~

It’s been three weeks. I thought Cammy would never talk again. I believed she wouldn’t, right up until she did yesterday.

I just kept us moving. Different places in the city. Not staying in any one place for more than a day. Walking days, seeking refuge at night. The zombies smell us, you know. They can smell us for miles. So at night it’s been strong places. Strong places where they can’t get in and then hope like hell that these were not some of the new breed, the ones that don’t seem to have a need to avoid the day, and that they would be gone in the morning.

I started carrying a radio the other day. Clips on the belt. FM. Picks up a lot of talk during the day. There’s a place that a lot of the people I hear from have heard about. Down south somewhere. Nobody seems to know exactly where it is. But others swear they have talked to the people that founded this place. A city… Somewhere down south. I had heard of something like that when it was Donita and me back in New York. But the word I keep hearing is that it is a safe place. That it is open to everyone.

So that is where I had been thinking about getting us to. Three days ago we got a truck, it’s still just me and Cammy, but it feels safer.

I have been thinking about this place. I don’t know who these people are. If they even exist, I only know the whole world is fucked up. I have come to understand that even if I get us as far South as I can, we wont make it for long. There are only two of us that can fight. The dead are getting smarter. And that is not just my point of view. It’s on the radio. They all say it.

L.A. and New York both are barely hanging on. Both! Barely hanging on! Nearly over run! We’re right here. I see it every day. The people talking aren’t exaggerating at all. If the big cities are truly falling apart, and people can’t make it banded together, how can we make it alone?

No. I’m heading for this place. I’m hoping it’s real. Today on the radio I caught someone talking and it sounded like he was talking about the same place I have heard about. Too far away to hear me. Skip. You can never tell where it’s coming from. I’m just hoping it’s true. That I didn’t just imagine it to assuage my mind.

Meantime I am trying to keep us alive. Find strong places to stay through the nights. There are strong places. Places you can find if you give it some thought. Stairwells in highrise buildings. Steel and concrete. They can’t get through those doors. Deep freezers in grocery stores. Heavy steel doors. The vehicles if we have to and we have had to. They can’t get in there to get us either. A little fire at night if I can, because they are afraid of fire. It’s one constant, so far. The Zombies don’t like the smell of smoke.

Canned stuff to eat. Christ, we’ll be eating canned shit until we die. Get up the next day and push on. Get moving again. And that is what I’ve done. Kept us moving. Kept us safe. And she has come willingly, although silently, like a big, semi animated puppet. And then yesterday she was sitting beside me, silent as she had been since the thing with Madison, and she spoke.

“I don’t like beans, Bear. I just don’t… Maybe we could find something different tonight?” She had lifted her voice at the end and made it into a question. I was winding my way through the middle of an abandoned car and a wrecked, burned out truck. Months old. I looked over at her. She smiled, tentative at first, but then it lit up her face. I had to laugh. I had, had so much pent up inside me.

“The beans are a bit much then?” I asked.

“A bit,” she agreed.

I bought the truck to a dead stop for a second not knowing what to say.

“You could say, ‘Welcome back,’” she said softly.

“Welcome back,” I repeated every bit as quietly. “Welcome back…”

…

Amber and I ended up releasing the Zombie Plagues, completely re-edited and available from Amazon, Dell… Amazon.com: A. L. Norton: books, biography, latest update https://www.amazon.com/stores/A.-L.-Norton/author/B078WZT853

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