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UNTITLED ZOMBIE STORY
By Wayne Webb
Chapter 10.3
Margaret was pretty sure she had shaken off
her pursuers, taking a meandering route through the empty city streets and
avoiding large concentrations of the emaciated zombies that lugged up
depressions or blocked up sections of street that they could not climb out of
on steps. The noise of the people following her was getting fainter and further
away with each new twist and turn she took.
She had the device on her that would keep
the undead at bay but the live person was another matter. She had no weapon to
defend herself, and no way of communicating with her son. They had decided on
where to meet up if each part of the operation had gone well, but she still
needed to get there and it was some way away from where she was now.
Margaret was in a parking building on the
outskirts of the City they had brought her and Ben to in order to affect the
hostage exchange. It was a park and ride affair, where you could store you car
for the day and then take a bus or light rail to the City Centre and avoid
congestion. A large portion of the population of the city had fallen to panic,
like other built up areas. As people started dying and coming back as Zombies,
the death toll began to pile up. People
abandoned their cars that were too difficult to get to and fled on foot, often
trapping themselves with the slathering undead.
Those initial few weeks were the GZA, the
Great Zombie Apocalypse. It was like all the TV shows and the movies were
coming true, but unlike the fictional world, workarounds started to present themselves.
Barricades, fire and elevated living spaces started becoming the thing to do to
survive. The problems that people had in the aftermath were sociological and
psychological. Who to trust, who to interact with and how to get what you need.
Most of the electronic infrastructure took
a big hit with the power plants and the telephony networks collapsing in the
first few weeks and the knowledgeable people, those who survived anyway, had no
centralized authority to report to and no way to organize their skills.
Margaret was alone for the first two weeks;
her son Ben had survived too but they were nowhere near each other. He husband
had passed and left the family business to Ben, and he had sidelined her in
order to put his own stamp of authority on the organization.
He lost a lot of good people in the first
few weeks but then when things settled he had the chance to rebuild again and
start a new life in the new world. Margaret found her way to where he was and
that was the problem from the get go. She was used to being in charge and Ben
knew he had to be, but she was still his mother and he was unable to sideline
her like he had before the GZA.
Things were too different and the people
that reported to him were fractured and stressed, it was a difficult time and a
lot of energy went into trying to stabilize the world they lived and get things
going again.
Margaret walked through the parking garage
and lined up a few likely candidates for cars she could take, she had to make
her choice carefully. If a car had an open gas flap then it had probably been
siphoned already, and the cars on the ground floor were mostly stripped
already. She could not take too new a car, if they had proximity keys or
steering locks then it would be unlikely that she’d be able to do much with
them.
She needed an older car, unvandalised and
full of gas but also with little chance of breaking down or being
unserviceable. She figured that she maybe had two or three attempts before
someone would notice the noises coming from the parking building. If her
searching captors did not hear her directly they would then see the undead that
would flock to the noise. In a silent city devoid of life, the hollow rumble of
a car starting up in a giant concrete noise-amplifying box, there would be
plenty of undead swarming to the building. She had personal immunity via the
device, but she had no measure of how far it would work on the undead. Sound on
the other hand carried for a long time on the still air and as soon as she
started it would be a matter of minutes before a shuffling finger would be
pointing out her location with a few hundred undead in range of the sound.
Margaret raided the offices on the ground
floor and helped herself to some tools and supplies. There was an empty gas
canister and a hose, left behind in the middle of the second floor on the way
to the top, she figured someone had a similar plan and did not make it all the
way to the cars, but was interrupted.
She still had the device so the undead
would not be in her way, they would be the threat of her pursuers learning her
location. There were spikes on some of
the entrances and she took a hammer and beat one of the spikes back into the
ground, but it took too many strokes and made a hell of a noise, echoing all
around. She put the thought aside and decided to find the car first and worry
about the escape route later. It occurred to her that a few car doors could be
removed and used as ramps to drive over the spike line, not perfect or elegant
but mostly silent to set up and without the risk of drawing in the undead.
She walked up the ramps, taking her time
and resting between every second floor. Her hip was still tender from the fall
off of the fire escape when she was making her escape earlier. She had been on
her feet for a couple of hours now and it had to be near midday as she climbed
slowly through the floors towards the seventh and final level of the structure.
There were no undead on the floors anywhere
in the building. It had long been abandoned and with the ramps there was no
impediment to the zombie population just walking all the way out of the
building. From the very roof of the
structure she found a few older cars and with the roof being open topped, there
was less chance of her being heard or making too much of a racket that would
echo all around.
An old Volkswagen Beetle was just sitting
near the ramp, in a perfect spot for her to take.
Margaret rubbed her hands together
silently.
