“You gonna talk into that thing all day or we going after the grub.” Angus was a big man, he didn’t appreciate my Zombie Video Diary.
“Stand right there,” I said and flashed a picture. It showed the big blue pool supply sign, the two trucks and a posse of half naked Zombies sniffing around the trucks. You could just barely see the Piper boys sitting on cupolas of the tanker trucks. The Piper boys were God’s gift to us. Two rednecks in from Texas. I’d hired them to tote speakers at the last concert. They worked hard, laughed when they should, and could shoot, we invited them in. They brought squirrel rifles. Little bolt action 22 caliber rifles. The kind the survivalist laugh at. They dropped more zombies than my AR15 assault rifle ever thought of. Of course they tend to shoot straighter than I do.
We weren’t a very big group. Me and Sally, and her two friends. They showed up the same night the trucks had. We did a session with the amps turned up. Just for the fun of it. We’d finished and were turning off the lights and they drove right up to the gate horns honking like hell. They weren’t there for the music, just looking for a hole to crawl in. The zombies were already thick. The Piper boys manned up and together we tried to clear the way, but most of the newcomers never made it to the gate. And we were shooting like heck. Three of them made it in. Turns out Sally was the only one worth a shit. The next morning, while the other two was sitting around crying, she got to working in the kitchen. We put the other two digging latrines. They complained, them being girls and such and there being asphalt to dig through. But Angus and I talked and we’d be damned if we was gonna keep flush toilets going with drinkable water. After that we had the one driver, his mother and a sister-in-law, the other driver’s wife, God knows I thought about putting her out, but I owed her old man. Then we had two waitresses, a cook and dishwasher the three preschoolers that I foisted off on the driver’s wife, let her do something. That was all that was left of the staff. And that was us.
That and of course the Piper brothers.
And my chickens. I kept a flock of fifty little salmon favorelles. I figured it might be good for meat and eggs. They bitched like hell when I threw them in the gunny sacks for the trip over, but I like my eggs. If we survived they’d make good trading stock.
Every now and then one would fly over the fence. We’d all watch. Ain’t nothing funnier than a zombie trying to catch a chicken. Zombies are fast, but it’s just flat hard to catch a chicken. After a couple of zombies got a handful of tail feathers, the chickens learned. If we wanted to watch zombies chase chickens we had to throw one over.
We were set to get the trucks. They had now been idling for three days. The driver said they’d idle til the tank was empty. We didn’t want that.
We had a plan. The three of us that could shoot would lay down the cover, that would be me and the Pipers. Angus had a shot gun, as did my drummer. They could be cover for the driver. He was the only guy I trusted to take a sixty foot semi and back it into a tight gate at 20 miles per hour. We had the cook and the dishwasher at the gate, one had a .410 shotgun that’d been my wife’s and one had an old straight bore pump 12 gauge. He could handle the shotgun but he was half blind and I’d be damned if I was giving him anything with muzzle velocity. They’d keep the zombies out of the compound. If they got in we were stacked thin enough we wouldn’t make it. We all knew it. The other trucker’s old lady was in the with the kids. Sally manned the stage. She had my thirty-thirty lever action rifle. I didn’t really know if she could shoot, but she was our only backup.
The drill was simple, swing the gates out. The waitresses from the dining room did that. Me and the Piper boys would start taking head shots the second the Zombies took notice. Angus, the driver and my drummer, would hit the truck, driver in first with Angus covering the door, the drummer in the passenger seat. Angus following it back in. The cook and the dishwasher take anything that got too close to the gate. And the two waitresses bring the gate closed. It was a great plan.
Angus unlocked the gate and lifted the anchor peg. Step one. Nothing but passing interest, no zombie charge. The gates open. Piper-the-older has the right flank, Piper-the- younger has the left. The pops of their twenty-two long rifles sound small. They aren’t. When a head shot is what you need, something that will get in and bounce around a bit is pretty damned good. A twenty two does a fine job of that. I had the AR-15, semi auto. I batted clean up, if my crew put a Zombie down but it didn’t want to stay down, I took it out.
It was good, Angus, the driver, and my drummer were already across the street and in the parking lot. Only about a hundred feet to the cab. Fish in a barrel. Then yips came from the left. Young Piper’s station.
“Oh shit,” I heard him say. But he was good. He had three twenty shot clips and a bolt action. He could get off thirty rounds a minute. Not a great condolence when a swarm of what must have been sixty of the things turned the corner. Maybe a hundred yards out. I could do a hundred yards in less than ten seconds. Most of these things could do it too if they put a mind to it. They seemed to.
The waitresses screamed in unison. They started to pull the gates shut. The cook and the dishwasher were helping. Angus and the driver could see it. They didn’t give the truck a second thought as they turned back to the gate. I heard the heavy crack of Sally sending out lead from behind me. I was glad.
“Come back, back in,” I screamed. My drummer was already pulling at the door to get in the cab. The zombie charge was coming from the other side. He didn’t know. I jumped off the stage next to Sally.
I screamed again, everybody screamed. It didn’t matter. My drummer was half deaf. Being a drummer in a rock and roll band didn’t prepare you for the zombie apocalypse. He went into the cab, just like the plan. Ok, I figured, we could clear the cab in a bit of time. Stay put.
The cook and the dishwasher weren’t shooting. They were tugging on the gate. Sally seemed to know what she was doing. When the firing stopped I glanced over. She was feeding ammo in like a pro. We shared a smile.
The gates were going closed. I risked a jump from the stage and with only a slight stumble on the landing I made for the gate and smacked the cook across the back of his head with my free hand. “Let them in.” He wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the box but he got the idea. He held the gate open. The waitresses ran. Sally came up from behind. She’d left the half loaded rifle and had pocket pistol. She fired off three rounds. Two zombies stumbled. One was young, a redhead, a really hot red head. Intact. Something about the steroids in the mix made them look better. For a moment I wondered if they could be tamed. Sally answered the question with a head shot that sent red everywhere. I’d liked her from the minute I drug her through the gate, now I like her more. The zombies were less than a dozen yards away when Angus and the driver stumbled through. The steady popping of the twenty-twos didn’t stop and the bodies fell like drops in a rainstorm. Funny thing about drops. You don’t miss a dozen or so of them in the middle of a storm. And it was a storm.
That rainstorm was clawing at the gate. The cook seemed to have come to his senses and he stuck the shot gun between the bars of the gate and let go three quick rounds. This gave Angus time to slip the anchor pin and the gate was secure.
The feral yips and growls didn’t stop, they just found a new focus. My drummer was standing on the board of the truck looking confused. The door open behind him.
He was on the wrong side of the fence. Way on the wrong side of the fence. He was a great drummer, he just wasn’t real smart. He came for the fence. There were easily fifty of them between him and the gate. The Pipers were good, just not that good. Angus and I both emptied everything. For a second I thought my drummer might make it. He had good hand eye coordination and he emptied his shotgun on the run with solid effect. If they had still been people, they would have scattered. Zombies don’t have survival instincts, they have pack instincts and the pack instinct said close in. He had both hands on the fence when they finally got a grip on him.