I was becoming seriously impressed with them.
Another team gathered up all of the discarded weapons and ammo they could find, while another group went around draining gas tanks. Two of the three pickups were drivable, so they were disabled in a way to make it hard for other survivors to easily fix. They used the backhoe to lift the road warriors' and our ATVs over the fence. All other vehicles were disabled by blowing up their gas tanks.
The dead were piled up, drenched in kerosene, and burned.
I helped with the unloading of the trucks, while Olivia was led away by our mothers. Girl talk, I suppose. From the look she gave me as they took her away, I think Olivia would've preferred to stay and help. I can only imagine what questions they had.
I worked side-by-side with my dad and Mr. Monday, as well as Mr. Forrester. I told our tale of woe as we worked. Lots of the men asked questions, and they all seemed amazed by our ordeals and especially our success. Everyone was suitably appalled by Emory's policy of impressment.
"Are you serious?" Mr. Forrester asked, looking incredulous. "The citizens of Emory enslave every survivor they find and force them to fight the zombies?"
They were calling the infected zombies before I was halfway through my story. I had the impression they never associated them with zombies, which was just bizarre to me. After listening to and speaking with others on the radio they only thought of them as poor infected people whose minds were burned away by a biological weapon of mass destruction. They were probably right, but I still thought the definition of a zombie was loose enough to include them.
Once the villagers salvaged all they deemed usable, they removed the bridges and ladders, and then everyone started back toward the hilltop. There was going to be a gathering to decide what to do about the coming mega horde.
As we ascended the hill I started spotting how they adapted to survive. The big corporate farm had lots of barns and warehouses on the hill, which they'd mostly emptied to divide up into living quarters. So all of the tractors and equipment were parked and stacked everywhere. Outside a pair of warehouses were stacks of pipes and large sprinkler heads for irrigation. They'd used the bulldozers to dig out trenches to park and protect gasoline tanker trailers. I was told they had warehouses full of seeds. And they'd even gone out into the surrounding country to disassemble and bring back some windmills for pumping water out of the ground.
They'd come a long way toward becoming self-sufficient. The zombies and road warriors were the only things keeping them from starting a successful farm town. The only hitch I could think of was modern crops didn't produce viable seeds, so they'd have to find another source of seeds in the future.
"We just have to survive until the die out is over," Mr. Forrester said.
"Die out?"
"The government scientists out west think the infected will all eventually die of starvation, disease, and exposure. They aren't sure how long that will take. Maybe a few years. Once the infected are gone, then we can start the process of recreating civilization."
"And then the US government will return?" I asked. "I've heard from other survivors that the government said we were all infected, either zombies or carriers of the infection, so everything east of the Rockies will forever be no man's land. And soldiers will kill us if we tried to migrate to the western US."
"That's about what we know," Dad said. "The rest of the world wants to keep this contained, so we've been
quarantined
."
"Have y'all considered moving west to the desert of West Texas and New Mexico?"
"We thought about it, but decided there was too much uncertainty," Mr. Forrester said. "We couldn't guarantee we'd be welcomed, or even find a location with water. We're better off here."
I couldn't argue that assumption. They had better information about what could be expected out west. Still, staying deep inside the zombie lands seemed crazy. From what little I'd picked up, they hadn't seen any really big hordes in Indian Village. Yet. In fact, the road warriors we'd killed and scattered the night before was the greatest threat they'd face so far.
The rest of the villagers were assembled when I reached the top. I quickly found Olivia sitting between our mothers. I squeezed in between her and my mom.
"I want to thank everyone for joining us here," Mr. Forrester said. "I won't beat around the bush. We welcomed two new members to the village today, Kyle Holt and Olivia Monday. Before anyone objects, their parents are citizens, and we don't turn away family.
"But they came bearing bad news," he continued. "They spotted a huge horde of infected several days north of us. Kyle believes the horde will surround the village and try to get inside."
"Let them try," a woman called. "I've never seen an infected so much as try to enter the moat."
"They'll give up after a few days and move on," a man called. "This so called threat is hardly meeting worthy."
I couldn't handle it. Standing, I held up my hand and looked them all over. Everyone quieted down.
"You've been lucky so far," I said. "Olivia and I have fought our way through the zombie lands from Carson, and let me tell you zombies are tenacious and aren't smart enough to realize it would be easier to bypass us. We spent ten days in Emory, fighting a horde that completely encircled the city. They have two rivers to keep the zombies at bay, and the zombies are still there trying to get to them."
"Zombies won't move on as long as they can see someone over here," Olivia said. "They aren't that smart. They will stay here until they get across, or they all die."
"Let them die," the man said. "I can wait."
"How long. Three months? Six months?" I asked. "As they die, the other zombies eat them. That horde could survive all winter. It's that big. We have to deal with them now or we won't be able to plant crops come spring."
"We'll gas bomb them."
"That won't work. They'll fill the fields all the way to the woods," I said, starting to feel frustrated. Maybe it was me. I've only fought zombies. The idea of sitting back and waiting was alien. "You're super-sized Molotov Cocktails might work on a small – Oh."
I got the chills as an idea began to form. It was crazy, but it might work.
"What?" Olivia asked.
"I just had a thought. Maybe we can kill them all," I whispered. "But I have to ask the people in the know first."
"What?" Mr. Forrester demanded. "Just say it. We're a democracy here."
I held my hand up for quiet and thought it through. Walking past him, I looked out across the open fields. I wasn't surprised to see a few zombies already halfway across the fields, all heading straight for the hilltop village.
"I noticed you have lots of irrigation pipes and sprinklers," I said.
"Yes. The old corporate farm brought them in a few years ago to help with the drought," Mr. Forrester said. "Why?"
"How fast can you put them out all around the village?"
"Couple of days," he said. "Again, why?"
"Is there a way to make gasoline flow through them?"
"That would kill the crops!"
"It would kill the zombies, too," I said. I caught Olivia's eyes and grinned. "Or actually, we set off the sprinklers and spread a little gas all around. Just enough to cover the zombies with gas."
"And we fire them up," Olivia said, nodding. "Wow."
"The explosion would kill us all!" another man cried.
"No," I said. "Listen. We don't have to have an explosion. We just have to light the zombies on fire. A quick sprinkling of a few seconds, then set them on fire before the gas evaporates. It's the evaporated gas that explodes."
We argued about it until people slowly started coming on board. The men who understood the sprinkler system, who had used it before for its intended purpose, reluctantly agreed it was possible. After that, the conversation turned technical to the point I didn't really understand, but they worked out how to pump gas out the gas station's underground tank.
"One other thing," I said. "I think we need to start posting lookouts on the highway so the horde doesn't surprise us."
Most of the villagers thought it would take the horde at least five days to reach us. Olivia and I argued they could cover more than forty miles in a day if they wanted. Zombies seemed tireless at times. As far as we knew they didn't really need to sleep, so they could walk day and night. I gave us three days, four at the most.
Chapter 25
I squinted into the darkness. It was late, or early morning, depending on how you thought. In an hour or so we'd get the predawn light. Maybe sooner. It got light awful early in summer. My guard shift would end after our relief ate breakfast.
"All night guard is killer," I said.
"That's why Forrester post guards in pairs," Mr. Monday said.
After so long on the road with Olivia and Ralph, it was strange being with others. They didn't do things like we did. I didn't agree with how they operated, but it was working for them. Who was I to call them out on things like guard shifts and separation of duties and responsibilities?
There was a lot to admire there, too. If the villagers were nothing else, they were fast and efficient. The irrigation system was deployed and tested with just a half-second burst with gasoline. Worked like a charm. I seemed to get most of the credit, though I just had the idea. They made it work.
Mr. Forrester setup a monitoring station, as he called it, a little past where Olivia and I had stashed the ATVs. It was on high ground overlooking the highway and farmlands to the north. They even built a treehouse for the lookouts. The lookouts were all women and any men too old to help with the preparations. Olivia couldn't get out of her watch on the third night, which I thought was much too close to when the horde would arrive. The horde's outliers were reaching us after the second day, from north, west, and east.
Worse, the village only had two ham radios and refused to risk one at the lookout point, so the lookouts had to send a rider on an ATV to tell us when they spotted the horde. Personally, I argued they should both return the moment the main horde was spotted. Mr. Forrester insisted they stay on post until told to return. He was in charge.
I did convince them to get both of the pickups up and running, with makeshift cowcatchers welded to the front. I think they agreed in part because they were intrigued by the idea. Maybe amused was a better word. On the evening of day three, Olivia had to go to her post before they finished the trucks, but the next shift would have safer transportation. I tried to get them to swap out a pickup right away, but I was denied.
"Don't worry, Olivia will be fine," her father reassured me.
We were pulling the all night guard shift together at the gas station. There were dark shadows moving out in the fields making me nervous, but that wasn't unusual. Best I could tell, since there was no moon due to cloud cover, the early arrivals were feasting on other zombies killed over the last three days. The village sharpshooters would take them out come daylight with deer rifles. They were quite good at it.
"I know. She's really good at taking care of herself," I said. "But I still don't like it. It scares me."
The lookouts were only allowed a single pistol each. Olivia snuck out with her sawed off shotgun. I felt a little better. The fact that none of the lookouts had been spotted by passing zombies helped, too. All reports said zombies ignored the ATVs and never looked up, so the previous lookouts thought they'd be safe.
But still, it was my Olivia out there.
"Jesus!" Mr. Monday cried when three zombies charged up to the moat. One of them fell in, splashed around as if he'd drown, and finally crawled out. I shook my head. The moat was only waist deep. "They surprised me."
The zombies were staring at us with those rage filled eyes. Very creepy.
"How many are out there?" I asked.
The overpass blocked our view westward, and the hill behind us blocked more of the rest. The only zombies I saw were coming through the underpass. That was my first overnight watch, so I wasn't sure if their numbers were unusually high or not. Seemed like an awful lot of them. Yet, no one came back from the lookout to warn us the horde had arrived.
"More and more are coming in every night," Mr. Monday said. "Forrester isn't concerned, but I – "
Shots rang out from the north.
"Olivia!" I cried.
"Why are they shooting?" her father asked.
I could think of lots of reasons. One big one. They were overrun by so many zombies they couldn't get to the ATV and escape. I couldn't imagine them shooting unless zombies had spotted them.
Could zombies climb trees?
I looked at the pickups, backed up to the moat. The zombies were ignoring them. The keys were in the ignitions. There were no weapons mounted at the moment. Still, they ran and had a full tank of gas. The area between the gas station and the overpass would not be gassed up. We were worried about blowing up the underground tanks. It wouldn't be too hard to clear that area with guns.
Someone started clanking on the bell atop the hill. That was the alarm. The all hands on deck call. Everyone with a weapon would go to their fighting position on the side of the hill.