02 Inevitable Disaster
The day the horde showed up, I wasn't surprised to see them. A few days prior a pod of whales had the nerve to run aground on my private beach and die there. Nobody knows why they do it, or what makes them do it, but by the time I spied them from my hilltop they were already dead and bloating like zeppelins. Their stench drew thousands of zombies from the bay town to gorge on the massive beasts, which in itself was enough bad news to put the future of my home in doubt.
Like any settlement at the time, the Hermitage had a defensive perimeter. All around the region I had scouted the roads and the flat places where zombies might like to amble and, wherever there was a convenient ditch or other zombie-catching obstacle, set a trap and baited it with John Phillip Sousa.
The hard part was setting up a pole of some kind, typically a long metal stake from a big-box hardware store or garden center, sunk down with a post driver. A few times I tried actually digging holes and filling them with cement and a wooden post, but that was ten times the work for mostly the same result. On top of the pole, out of reach of desiccated zombie fingers, I installed a lure. When something ambled by it would trip a nearby motion detector, and that would signal a digital recorder to play one of Sousa's marches. The shamble would detour towards the sound, fall into the ditch or get stuck in concertina wire or otherwise find themselves trapped. Sooner or later I would stroll by with a sharp stick and poke them all in the brains.
The parts to make lures were easy enough to find. I made a habit of scavenging motion detectors, breadboards, wire, and simple electronic components at every opportunity. The lures were hardly more than toys, amateur stuff really, powered by a solar panel and some rechargeable batteries. They weren't exactly reliable: a lot of times they only succeeded in startling wildlife, and they often failed in winter when the days were short and overcast. But they were easy to make, there were a lot of them, and they did a good job of sidelining small shambles of zombie into places where they could be safely dispatched. Once in a while the lures went missing entirely, pilfered by humans who liked the idea and decided to walk off with them. It was flattering when it happened, and one time the thieves left behind a crate of canned food and cooler containing a bottle of antibiotics.
I can hear you asking, "Wait, go back! Why John Phillip Sousa?" Zombies are attracted to low pulsing noises more than they are to high-pitched irregular noises. Any music with a strong beat would suffice, but I used Sousa in particular because his marches were nearly as effective as EDM, but only half as annoying to me.
Near to the house I used a very different strategy: inconvenience. I blocked the access road with a gate and let vines grow all over it and the nearby fence. Zombies and humans alike were encouraged to walk the road that ran along the outside of the fence, past houses belonging to the hamlet. That outer fence didn't run entirely around my mountain, but it did block the easiest slope. Anyone who got past (or around) the fence would face a short but steep climb before they reached the garden and the house. A barbed wire fence ran through the garden, hidden under the canopy, a handy trellis for some plants. I hung bunches of Christmas bells on the fence at intervals, the tiny kind that are less attractive to zombies, so anything that tried to pass through it would get snagged and make the bells jingle to let me know I had caught something. I didn't like that the bells rang during storms or when the crows decided they were good playthings, but nothing in this world is ever perfect.
Zombies don't like to walk up steep hills, and they aren't very smart, but they are terrifyingly persistent. Their favorite prey is living people but they'll eat any living meat. Sometimes they'll chase rabbits up hills they wouldn't normally climb, or run deer to exhaustion, or surround a pack of coyotes and devour them all together while the poor beasts yelp and cry in awful unison. These adventures sometimes led them onto my property and, more than once, my interior fence snagged a lone zombie or a small amble of them before they reached my house. I would follow the sound of bells and find them pressed against the wire, stuck on the barbs among the runner beans and tomatoes, bad vines ready to be pruned.
Zombies will also scavenge meat that is quite rotten, with the exception of people: within a minute of a person dying the zombies lose interest in the corpse and look for something else to eat. The change from human corpse to upright zombie takes longer than a minute, but it starts at the moment of death and the zombies can tell.
If you know all of this, and your environment stinks of rotting whale, you shouldn't be surprised when a few zombies come to call. I was sleeping fitfully and outdoors in those days, in a tent pitched uphill from my house on a crest that offered the best possible view inland, over the grassy eastward curves of land and the roads once used by tourists on their way to the bay town.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
I didn't visit that spot often, not since I buried my dog there. He was a shaggy mid-sized mutt named Kojo, and he liked to sit on that spot with his nose in the wind, ears flapping behind him, eyes half closed. I would scan the world through binoculars, and he would sniff the world with his nose, and I like to think we had a pretty good handle on things for a while. But the zombies got him like they get everything. I found what was left of him, buried him in our favorite place, and promptly stopped going there. But when you are expecting a visit from the undead, a good tactical crest is the best place to be.
On day four of the beached whale misadventure I was swimming in their stink, unable to sleep, when dawn showed me the worst of all possibilities: a zombie shamble hundreds of thousands strong. They were far away at first, but the road was stuffed so full of them that they fanned out to the slower, rougher terrain alongside. The overall impression was a dark wedge crawling over the landscape, its point aimed directly at my hamlet.
Hour by hour they came closer, innumerable and unstoppable.
The stench of rotting whale blubber on the wind was more powerful than Sousa, and they ignored my lures. They should have followed the easy road down main street and been diverted to the bay town, but the wind brought them directly at me. Zombies on open ground like to shamble with an arms length of space between them but when they hit an obstacle, like a fence, and they are intent on something beyond it, they press against each other and the obstacle until something gives way.
My outer fence held them for a few minutes, until the accumulated pressure of all those bodies was too much and it collapsed like a bad levee.
One thing you won't read in your textbooks about the Plague years is that nearly all zombies are naked. They don't start out that way, but as they dry and thin their clothes no longer fit. The pants are usually the first to go. When the pants first fall down the zombie trips over them and ends up on the ground. Too dumb to crawl its way out of its predicament, it tries to stand up and falls again. This can go on for a long time, until it just happens to step out of the legs and is finally free, sans pants, to roam and menace and eat again. Tops and dresses take longer to shed, but they too end up at the wayside. Some items don't come off so easily, like one-piece swimsuits, flack jackets, lycra bodysuits, and those harnesses movers wear to lift something heavy. I have seen all of those things, and much more besides, on the formerly living. But in the main they are naked and gaunt and dry and not very fun to look at.
The naked dead flowed onto my Hermitage in their thousands and their tens of thousands. The inner fence fared worse than the outer one, taking a few tangled zombies down as it fell, to be ground into pieces by the flood. It was useless against such numbers.
I should have bolted then and there, but I was loathe to leave. Beneath the low keening of the dead, I could still hear the speech of birds and the whispers of trees. And even with that awful stench of whale rot over everything, I could imagine the scents of neglected fruit fermenting in the sun, loamy soils, the spice of bay and eucalyptus, salt air from the Pacific, wild lavender, and a hundred other smells that made up mine and Kojo's place.
I had thought I was long out of the habit of wishing for anything, but right then I wanted more time, I wanted it with such force I felt I could hit them with it, crush them with my wanting. I knew I had no need of that place, that I could find another and build it up. But why should I have to? Why shouldn’t I keep the place of my choosing? Didn't I have the right to live in peace, with a dog and a garden and not be a bother to anybody?
I mark that moment now, because that was the real beginning of the Machine. Whatever our accomplishments, for good or ill, our reasons matter. Reasons aren’t all that matter, but they are added to the scales alongside our methods and our results. Mine were simple, and selfish: I wanted to stay in one place long enough to get tired of it; I wanted sleep without fear; I wanted to garden or hunt or build and not wonder if I would return home that night; I wanted to have a dog that wouldn’t be eaten by zombies. I was fully packed, prepared to flee, but I couldn't because I wanted what they were taking from me.
I was stuck on that grassy crest, pinned by my accumulating losses, until the zombies stumbled into my fire pit. The fire pit! I had banked it deep in layers of ash at sunset, but a zombie gets really dry after walking all morning in the summer sun. A little air and a bit of desiccated skin was all it took to turn a coal into a hot flaming zombie. They don't like burning any more than a human does, and for almost a minute the first one stumbled in all directions, setting fire to its fellow shamblers, who set fire to more, and soon the garden and the house and the hillside were aflame while the backlog of a hundred thousand more were still coming.
The fire broke my spell. There was no more Hermitage to want, nothing to stay for but a grave with a few scraps of fur and bones in it. I sprinted up the hill and picked out a sled. Before leaving I sprayed myself with Febreze with the hope I would never smell as tempting to zombies as the feast on the beach.
With the smoke and flames still climbing up one side of the mountain, I hurled myself down the other as fast as I could, fast enough to outrun wildfire.