The Third Time is the Harm (Cities of the Dead) Read online

was manned first by Eli, then by Roy’s daughters until the wives woke to prepare breakfast. Even this far off a road, one had to be ready for zombies. They had no rhyme, no reason, no predictability, a lesson Malcolm had learned in the early days of the apocalypse when foraging for the necessities of a life he hadn’t ever - really - anticipated living, and he had anticipated a lot of end-of-the-world scenarios.

  But all of them had been based around the actions of people and what people would do in the event of a once-in-a-thousand-year natural disaster or sudden nuclear attack. It had never occurred to him to prepare for Night of the Living Dead. And, anyway, he had never watched zombie movies, so he had no idea.

  Malcolm, Roy and Eli were on their knees in the scrub brush watching five undead mill aimlessly around the barn that housed their four-wheelers. They kept the vehicles a mile away from where they lived so that the sounds of the engines wouldn’t draw the walkers to their actual home, but it had been almost a week since they had last used them, and there was a squad of zombies standing around the structure.

  “The cost of these steaks just got a bit more expensive,” Roy said.

  Malcolm turned to him and nodded.

  Eli looked at them with incredulity. “We can take them out easy from this distance, Dad. They’ll never know what hit them.”

  Malcolm looked at his son and gave him the “patience, son” face. His son was always too eager to take a shot, to claim the victory, to walk home with the game.

  “That doesn’t make a whole lotta sense,” Roy said, watching through binoculars. “They can’t know what’s in the shack, since they weren’t anywhere around here when we locked ‘em up last week. But, there they are, almost as if they were told to guard it.”

  “You know, from all we’ve seen them doing the last year or so, it’s starting to make me wonder if maybe they’re not completely dead inside, like there might be some small bit of the person left inside,” Malcolm said, watching the undead mill about and scanning the horizon for some sign of something intentional. “Maybe they’re aware of the world? Maybe they remember things? Maybe they have some intelligence?”

  Roy looked at him and shrugged. “Let’s hope not. On the plus side, they’re slow. But on the other side, they usually come in packs.”

  Malcolm nodded in thought. “I’m starting to wonder if they’re some sort of pack-hunting ... species. They can’t succeed well individually, but as a large group, they have a good chance of surviving an encounter through attrition.”

  “Let’s just kill ‘em,” Eli said, pulling the arrow back-and-forth in his bow.

  “Eli, relax,” Malcolm said, waving his palm toward the ground. “We need to get a sense of the situation before we do anything.”

  “You two hold here,” Roy said, “I’ll flank ‘em from the right side and get a view of what’s goin’ on behind the structure and down the road towards town. If they’ve started figuring out how we’re operating, we’re going to need to start adapting. Just plain killing them might not always be the best first option if we want to figure out how it is they operate.”

  With that, Roy melted into the underbrush and made his way off, following a dry creek bed and disappearing into the earth tones of the landscape. Malcolm watched his friend and then turned to his son. Eli resembled him, was almost a duplicate, and yet had the personality traits of his ex-wife: stubborn, impetuous, too quick to make a decision that would turn into a mistake. He had spent years in the woods with Eli, trying to teach him the patience necessary before taking a shot, the importance of doing nothing but observing for long periods of time. But Malcolm suspected the electronics lifestyle Eli had gravitated to more readily influenced his actions: his son wanted a button to mash, a joystick to move and instant gratification or a re-spawn point for another try.

  But out here on the cold, windswept countryside, there were no re-spawn points. And less instant gratification.

  After a while, the walkie talkie clipped to Malcolm’s belt clicked twice, a double-hiccup indicating Roy was about to initiate transmission. Malcolm held it up to his ear and adjusted the volume downward.

  “Whatchya got?” Malcolm asked, his voice low and calm.

  “Just what you’re looking at, nothing else around.”

  “Alright, then, I’ll start with the one on the far left and move in, you take the one on your end and do the same, and Eli will shoot the center and then cover wide in case we miss anything,” Malcolm said. “Thirty seconds and let loose.”

  Malcolm turned to Eli. “Take the one in the middle, then pay attention to everything else but the zombies in front of the building, got it? We don’t want any surprises while Roy and I pick off the last ones.”

  Eli nodded and readied his bow.

  It was over in seconds. The two zombies not hit in the initial volley had no reaction to the sudden demise of their comrades. They just stood there and stared at the fallen ones until they were felled by arrows seconds later. Eli started to move and Malcolm grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back.

  “Wait. Just to make sure, we wait.”

  Eli bent down on a knee, readied an arrow in his bow, and scanned the desolate countryside. Nothing. Malcolm looked at his son and wondered what he was thinking, if he was here in this moment or if he was somewhere else, thinking of whatever it was his son thought about but didn’t talk with him about.

  The walkie clicked twice.

  “What do you make of it?” Malcolm said into his walkie.

  “Seems clear.”

  “Alright,” Malcolm said, tapping his son on his shoulder, “let’s go get some hamburger.”

  Twenty-minutes later they had stashed the ATVs in a dry storm water ditch and made their way on foot the half-mile to the farm. They moved slowly, in a staggered formation with about ten yards between each of them, Malcolm in the lead and Roy in trail. All had an arrow at the ready and were scanning the landscape. They made the road bordering the farm and each man and the boy took a knee, Malcolm setting his bow down and looking through his binoculars across the farm.

  “Well, there are two cows still alive, but I don’t see any undead,” Malcolm said. “Two very bony cows.”

  Roy took the glasses from Malcolm and scanned the farm. “Looks like. I don’t know that either of those is worth taking, their meat is probably tough as hell and gamy.”

  “We could take them back to the farm and nurse them back to health, and eat one of the one’s we have,” Eli said suddenly, his voice filled with optimism.

  Malcolm looked at his son and shook his head. “That we can’t do. We’re too far away from home; neither one of those cows would make it, and even if they could, we’d be exposing ourselves out here for too long. There’s too many walkers on the roads to risk the time it’d take to get them back.”

  “I have to agree with your dad on this one, Eli, those two cows aren’t worth it. They’re probably starving to death, and none of us know enough about how to bring them back to health,” Roy said.

  Eli sighed. “Why don’t we just kill one of them and take back what we can, then? It’s got to be better than squirrel.”

  Roy laughed. Malcolm smiled and rustled his son’s shoulder. “Well, yeah, probably, but they’ve been eating wild grass for a year. At least, what they can get of it, so they’re going to taste a lot more like wild animal than the beef you remember eating.”

  “You know, Mal, we are here. They are cows. And if we don’t eat them, they’re just gonna die when the winter really hits, so we might be doing them a favor it we take them out and get what we can. We can turn them into jerky at the worst, but I’m sure Nancy and Sara can figure out how to cook them to make them tasty,” Roy said.

  “Alright, alright, you’ve got a point, both of you,” Malcolm said. “We might as well take them both while we’re here.”

  Two hours later, Roy and Malcolm were mostly finished with cleaning the two cows, each man pleased with the decision to risk the journey. This meat would get them through
winter easily, even if it was probably gamy and tough. Eli stood watch near the entrance to the barn, standing in the shadows and scanning the outdoors for undead.

  “How’s it looking, Eli?” Malcolm said, wiping the blade of his Dozier K-7 knife and slipping it back into its sheath.

  Eli shrugged. “Haven’t seen anything since that foursome walked down the road an hour or so ago.”

  That group had stopped for a while on the road and given Eli the creeps. He couldn’t tell for sure from the distance, but had seemed to him the foursome of undead were looking at him. And then they had trundled along five minutes later.

  Malcolm didn’t know what to make of the way the zombies organized themselves or how they decided to move. Mostly, they congregated in population centers, accumulating new members over time until they reached some sort of density that caused them to disperse. Almost as if they knew, somehow, that the size of the group was now no longer good for hunting the living. There was no way to predict it, but downtown had seen the zombie hordes infest and abandon it several times, so Roy and Malcolm constantly monitored the activity in town for the times when it was empty. It was then they made raiding trips on the stores for supplies.

  Right now, the zombies seemed to be in a building phase, collecting at the state fairgrounds for whatever reason, and one had to be careful when moving through the world because there was no