Day 339 - Untitled Zombie Story Chapter 5 - (1,101 words)

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UNTITLED ZOMBIE STORY

By Wayne Webb

Chapter 5

The storm was starting in earnest now, the wind had picked up considerably in the last hour, causing a howling roar to echo in the spaces between the buildings. James had been in the ‘City’ for a week now and there was no word from his brother or the man that everyone here spoke so highly of, the erstwhile Ben Johnson. They had been on a ‘mission’ that was only ever mentioned in oblique terms and no one seemed to know what the objective or detail of this mission was, just that it was important and the committee that ran the City had sent them.

When pressed for any information the Citizens would clam up and back away from the conversation not afraid to just leave it hanging or show some mistrust in James’ curiosity as the outsider.

James had reasoned that every one was an outsider at some point and that he was not a prisoner or there unwillingly, he just wanted to know where his brother was and what he was doing.  He made some friends, who were pleasant enough and showed him the ropes, how to survive and get by in the City, how the communal aspects worked to mostly good results.

They had food stores and services, everyone who partook of a communal aspect like food or shelter had to take on a communal service as well. Some were more suited to various specialties, but there was a roster than ensured that even if you had a coveted position it would not be yours for long. Cooking was one of the ones that got swapped around a lot, the Citizens who were chefs, cooks or similarly skilled obviously had an advantage, but because the job was shared to people who did not have that knack, training sessions soon made all the difference.

Living a few feet off the ground in each house made a few things a little more difficult and in the cases of the infirm or immobile things were often brought to them. James had spent the first two days on the delivery roster with a group of teenagers who’s turn it was to ‘taxi’ the food and other supplies to the people who had issues of mobility. There was limited electricity and in the week that he had experienced it, outages were common enough and there was interruptions to the electrics every other day.

James had been given a house to himself, it had been prepared for new citizens in the last intake, and the City was looking for more people to make their community stronger and more capable before branching out to a nearby location. That was how they had come across James and Derek; they were scouting the town for supplies, materials and more importantly survivors. There were only five hundred or so people in the City, so it was more like a town, but it was reaching capacity in the way it had been put together, and the plan to expand came into play.

The previous occupants of the house had elected to move out with the hundred or so younger, able bodied and mostly single inhabitants to start the new City a few miles down the road. They picked the sites based on their proximity to towns and other locations where they would be able to monopolize resources. The new City had came across a fresh water lake that had a shallow and long shoreline that lead to a deeper center where there were not only fresh water but also some fish to farm.

The new City didn’t have a name yet and the original City was only named eponymously the City anyway, so it was not confusing yet, but if and when they grew it would be.

Around day five of living and working in the City, taking out garbage and making compost, helping with plumbing problems (which were mostly to do with blockages and gravity) the weather started to turn and the pressure changed, the locals and James all knew what that meant.

A storm was brewing.

The sound devices that corralled the zombies and pacified them were all moved to locations further away from the houses, and the positions for them were fixed as firmly as possible, so that in the case of a severe wind they would not be left unprotected. They formed a ring around the two hundred small buildings on stilts that ranged across what used to be open farmland.

Engineers among them did their best to shored up the houses and protect them against the potential threats of wind and rain. They were in no chance of rain or flooding hurting them, a flash flood unlikely in the open plains where the City was located. The idea of a tornado ripping into the town was the one that got started and tore through the community leaving as much damage in the rumors wake as a real twister would have done.

The City had no basements, no storm cellars and depended on the distance between the houses and the ground to foil the undead that had no presence of mind to climb much more than stairs or steps. Ladders and climbing with handholds defeated them every time. They did, and assumably could not learn to make the logical leaps required to climb for their prey. The sonic devices were driving them to Zombie Dumps outside the main area of the City where another daily, more gruesome task was undertaken.

James knew what happened on the Dump Patrol, and he was not looking forward to his turn there. They had seen some of the logic in this when disposing of the pacified Zombies at the fateful bend in the road where death and separation for the brothers became the unwanted theme. Two of the teenaged boys, fast becoming men in accepting responsibility and making sense of the world, went off to do the three day stint at the ‘Dump’.  When James met one of them while working on a blocked drain at the edge of the housing section, he looked like a different person. He had grown up in less than forty-eight hours and now looked weary and beaten down.

James was on the Dump the following week, his schedule chosen and advised well ahead of time to prepare for it. The now quiet youth who had been the loudest, most verbose and humorous of the group was now stoic and reserved, always looking like he was viewing something else behind his eyes, something he could not quite unsee, and something that stayed with him.