Cities of the Dead: Winters of Discontent Read online

  Bakersfield, California - Day 401

  Ben stood behind a large tree and cradled his Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun, scanning through the foliage on his side of the road for the people who had rigged the trap. He, Paul and Glenn had been driving down the back road with a couple of cases of canned goods when a tree had suddenly toppled across the road and forced him to brake hard. Not hard enough to avoid hitting the tree, though, and then a moment later gunfire erupted, smashing the front windscreen and catching Paul in the shoulder.

  They had slipped out of the pick-up quickly after that, Paul and Glenn heading into the woods to the right while Ben dodged to the left, out the driver’s side door. He had caught sight of a silhouette behind some low bushes and unleashed a couple of covering fire shots and had been met with a fusillade of return fire. Now, he was stuck behind a tree with no idea what he was up against. But he knew one thing for certain: any more shooting would attract the undead. If they weren’t already on the way. And there were always undead within gunshot. It was a sort of dinner bell for them, somehow.

  Nothing happened for a minute, and then his walkie came to life.

  “Ben, you okay?”

  It was Glenn.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. You see the assholes shooting at us?”

  “No. I think they’re waiting for us to move.”

  And, then, from somewhere in the woods a voice bellowed: “There’s only three of you. If you start walking away from the truck, we’ll let you leave. We saw you down at the distribution center, so we know what you have, and we mean to have it.”

  Ben reckoned the man speaking was only twenty yards away, on the other side of the road. He looked around the ground and picked a palm-sized rock. He threw it up through the trees where it kicked through branches before falling on the other side of the road. But the sound of it rustling through the branches did what Ben needed it to do, and a fortyish man with a full beard, ball cap and tan jacket popped out from behind a tree a dozen yards away and Ben quickly raised his weapon and squeezed the trigger, catching the man in the chest just below his neck and crumpling him to the ground without so much as a whimper. Ben chambered a round as he crouched and walked quickly toward a different tree, where he took a knee and listened for movement. Nothing.

  He creeped slowly forward, stopping every few yards to listen. They couldn’t go back down the road, toward the chain store distribution center because it was overrun with zombies and they’d barely made it away with the little they had. Others who had tried to raid it before had not been so lucky, judging by the abandoned vehicles and skeletal remains in the lot. The facility was still packed with dry and canned goods, a prize that would keep whoever could take it flush with food for months, if not longer. Why the undead remained near it was a mystery: it was almost as if they were guarding it because they knew its value.

  As unexpected as the zombies had been, Ben found the feral nature of the surviving humans to be just as shocking. At first, everyone had pulled together in an attempt to survive, but five or six months in, societal cohesiveness began breaking down into tribal allegiances based around family units, whether longstanding or newly forged. By the end of the previous winter, it was best to avoid new human contact as much as the undead: people frequently shot first. This wasn’t the first time he’d been on this end of an ambush. If he lived through it, it probably wouldn’t be the last.

  When he got to a spot near to where the bearded man had been standing he paused and took a knee. There were others out here and it was just as likely they were doing something like he was doing, moving through the trees and forest undergrowth looking for someone on the opposite side of the equation to shoot.

  And then he saw a skinny teenaged boy crouching low behind a tree, a semi-automatic pistol in his hands, his hair shaggy. The body of the bearded man lay on the ground a few feet beyond him.Father and son? Ben winced inside for a moment at that thought. He had always wanted to get married and have children, be a dad living in the suburbs and cooking on a gas grill, watching movies on Sunday night with the whole family gathered around the television after supper.

  He raised the shotgun and aimed at the kid from twenty feet and said, “Toss the weapon toward the sound of my voice or I’ll put a hole through your skull.”

  The kid tensed and froze in place.

  “You know I will because I just did. Don’t think about anything, don’t look anywhere, just take the gun and toss it on the ground my way.”

  The kid lowered his head slightly in defeat and tossed the pistol onto the ground half-way between them. Ben stayed low and kept the weapon aimed at the kid as he walked forward and picked up the pistol, stowing it on his back underneath his belt.

  “Lay down on your belly,” Ben said as he got close to the boy. “Anybody else on this side of the road?”

  The kid complied but said nothing.

  “Anybody else on this side of the road? I don’t really like wasting my ammo on people when there’re so many zombies about to be here, so if we can make this ambush end more quickly, we can all get away just that much sooner.”

  The kid turned his head and rolled his eyes up at Ben. “No, it was just me and Jake.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Roger.”

  “Who’s on the other side of the road?”

  “Dave and Mike.”

  “You got a car nearby?”

  The kid stared at him from the ground, confused.

  “You drive here or walk?”

  “We got a truck up the road a little bit.”

  And then Ben stepped over the boy and slammed the stock of the gun into the back of his head, knocking him unconscious. Ben slipped the kid’s gun out from Ben’s waistband and checked the magazine: eight rounds. Three short of full. Everyone was running low on ammo anymore, what with the amount of zombies that had had to be killed in the first year. And, now, people. Ben crept up to the edge of the road and knelt down in some tall scrub grass, scanning the area for the shape of a man in the woods.

  Three shots rang out to his right, close to the truck but on the other side of the road. Ben raised his shotgun and sighted down it as he swept it across the area. Two more shots popped out and Ben grimaced: they weren’t the sounds of Glenn’s AR-15, but of a large caliber pistol.

  Ben inched his way back toward his vehicle, toward the sound of the shots, moving slowly and carefully. Nothing else in the woods was making any sound and he didn’t want to snap a branch underfoot. He stopped when he caught sight of the truck on the other side of the downed tree. A moment later, two men emerged from the woods with weapons at the ready. The taller of the two was bleeding from the guts and he was doing everything he could to stay standing. The smaller man held a revolver in his right hand, a hunting rifle slung over his back. He wore a camouflage deer hunting outfit and a pair of dark black wrap-around sunglasses on.

  The taller man took a step toward the truck and collapsed against it, falling to the ground and banging his head on the road. He moaned in pain.

  “Mike, you gotta help me into the truck.”

  “I know, Dave, and I will, but there’s still one other motherfucker out here,” Mike said, looking around. “Try and sit up and use your weapon.”

  And then Ben saw the first of the undead on the road behind the truck, a lumbering crowd of at least twenty zombies shuffling toward the sound of the gunshots just exchanged. Ben frowned and started doing the math of life necessitated by living in this new world. The zombies were two or three minutes from the truck, he had a pistol with eight rounds, a shotgun with four, an adversary with a revolver, a dying man with a rifle, two likely dead companions and a truck full of several weeks worth of food.

  And a fallen tree between him and all of it.

  He shook his head slightly, his eyes on the man with the revolver who had ruined everything. The food was gone, the truck was gone, his friends were gone. Again. Was it zombies or human nature that caused it all, he wondered as he watched Mik
e bend down and give Dave a sip of water from a canteen. None of this had had to happen, but, in a cruel sense, it had also had to happen.

  He slipped a few feet into the woods and began a slow retreat from the scene, constantly on the lookout for the undead coming from other directions. You didn’t find them very often in the more wooded areas, but that wasn’t a rule you could count on. The undead had no rules.

  A half-mile down the road he came across a Ford 150 parked off the side off the road, covered in branches. It was locked. He looked into the bed of the truck and saw the normal survival items: sleeping bags, canvas sheets, a jug of water. Just a group of guys trying to find a way to stay alive. Just like everyone in the world. Just like him.

  Ben crossed the road and into the woods on the other side, finding a spot behind a tree and hunkering down. A couple of shots rang out down the road, where his vehicle was trapped behind a tree, and he knew it wouldn’t be long. Minutes later, Ben watched as Mike helped Dave down the road toward the parked pick-up truck. Dave was pale and blood soaked his shirt and pants. Mike held his pistol up and scanned both sides of the road as he helped Dave, but Ben knew neither of them would make it out of the woods alive. He’d been on this end of an ambush a couple of times, too.

  He waited until they got to the truck, a dozen yards away from him, and began pulling the brush from the hood when he raised the shotgun, sighted down it and blew a hole in Mike’s back without ever saying a word. Mike slid down the driver’s side quarter-panel of the truck, leaving a smear of blood on it before crumpling onto the ground, his head rolling over to face Ben. And then Mike’s eyes faded to dull and he was gone. Dave turned around and tried to raise his weapon but Ben was already aiming at him.

  “Just drop it,” Ben said.

  Dave took a moment to consider the situation, his eyes flicking down to the lifeless corpse of Mike and then stared directly into Ben’s eyes.

  “All of this, for nothing?” Dave asked.

  “Drop it or I’ll blow your head off.”

  “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  “You’re dead already. I’m not going to do anything to you if you drop that weapon. But we’re down to seconds, what with that horde of dead ones down the road, and I’d just assume save the round.”

  “You’re going to leave me to them in my condition?”

  Ben sighed and squeezed the trigger. Dave bounced off the side of the truck and fell face down onto the pavement. Ben found the keys to the truck in Mike’s pockets and collected his pistol and Dave’s rifle before starting the truck. He turned the truck onto the road and looked down to where he had been earlier with Peter and Glenn and saw the zombies shuffling up the road. He stared at them for a long moment and realized he no longer feared them the way he had the first months. They were now a permanent part of the environment he lived in, a fixed concern that factored into everything he did.

  Life didn’t mean what it had meant when he had worked at the bank. People were no longer customers who were always right. Killing a living person in this new version of the world didn’t carry the weight of taking a life in the old world. There had never been a shortage of assholes, but, now, it was okay to kill them. He pushed down on the gas pedal and drove away, leaving behind another moment in time he had never expected to experience.

  It was a dog eat dog world.

  ***

  THE START OF THE BREAKDOWN