06 Sandy

Hiding in the middle of a herd is just about the worst thing in the world. There are hundreds of them, sometimes thousands of them, shuffling along, the fresher ones breathing in that raspy way they sometimes do. To the uninitiated they can seem docile, just out for a bit of a shamble on a sunny afternoon. But they are always watching. Always listening. Always smelling. One errant sound, one chance movement, and your life will come to one of the most gruesome ends imaginable: eaten alive while you kick and scream and fight. So you lie down, cover up, and be silent. Maybe you pray (silently!) to Living Jesus for His protection, or curse (silently!) at Zombie Jesus for letting the world get so rotten. Maybe you think about all the people you’ve seen die at their hands, some of them in situations just like the one you're in. If you survived that late into Plague then you had a deep, deep store of very nasty memories, and they all play back in your mind during the long minutes and hours of enforced silence.

I was sheltering inside a convenient hatchback, under a mylar emergency blanket doused with my good friend Febreeze, stifled but well-hidden. Even if one of them looked right at me it wouldn’t detect anything it wanted to eat. All I had to do was keep reminding myself that it had always worked before, and it remained my best chance. Several times, I thought I heard one linger near me, casting about with whatever senses zombies possessed, and then move on. For over an hour I held down my fight or flight reflex with an iron fist.

A word of advice: the perfume they put into Febreeze had to be strong enough to withstand the product's odor-killing properties, so unless you want to choke on lavender while defying death, use the unscented version.

❖ ❖ ❖

I had abandoned Crush Manor as soon as blackberries came into their peak. By that time I had all the cured pork a man could eat before it turned bad, plus a variety of apples, citrus and nuts that would keep a while, and some stone fruits that would have to be eaten as it ripened. If I waited too long to make the journey I could get caught in the all-devouring central valley mega-shamble during its winter migration, or be overrun when the whale-fed zombies decided to turn east.

My immediate goal was tools and books. Building electronics requires some specialist gear like an oscilloscope, prototyping boards, voltmeter, soldering supplies, and a wide variety of tiny parts. I actually had no problem getting what I needed, since I knew the county so well. But the books were proving to be a challenge.

I needed a handbook of industrial chemical processes and some primers on factory design and industrial safety, if such things even existed. As I headed northeast, I tried a few colleges that weren’t too close to big population centers. Two had burnt down completely along with the towns around them, and at another campus the natural sciences building had been turned into a holding pen for what remained of the student body.

Circumnavigating herds, weather, broken roads, and the rare settlement brought me into northern Utah, from whence I had a clear approach north to Idaho or south towards Salt Lake and Provo. I had given up on searching colleges and instead went looking for consulting firms, where real professionals had spent their days doing real work. That’s how I ended up in a hatchback outside Salt Lake City. The streets near town were choked with abandoned cars, so I parked my station wagon in a former regional park that intruded into the city, a great spot both uphill and hidden among trees. I cycled into town, actually found two promising books at the office of a consulting firm, then on the return trip I cycled directly into a herd.

In time, they passed me by. A big shamble leaves stragglers in its wake, too slow to keep up and too degraded to go much farther on their own. These few I dispatched quietly then went on my way, satisfied with a day’s work well done. But my day's toil hadn’t begun yet. I dismounted, three hundred yards from my car, to made my customary approach by foot, intending to search the area by binocular. You never knew when your camp would be found by zombie, animal, or human, so I had a habit of observing my own camp from a distance before entering.

That day outside Salt Lake, I found an RV parked in my camp and two people raiding all of my carefully packed supplies. They were dirty scraps of men who smelled of booze and gasoline. The trailer full of gas cans was hitched to the RV. The food was nowhere to be seen except for a large pile of orange peels. The two raiders had removed all of my carefully sorted boxes of equipment and were dumping it all over the place, as if I would leave morsels of food packed between the resistors and spools of wire. Or, maybe they were looking for ammunition for the assault rifles they were carrying.

I had seen their type before, scavengers of the lowest order, but what I hadn't seen was the huge flag painted on the side of their RV. The left side was a blue square with a single white star, and the right side had two horizontal stripes, one red and one white. It looked like the Texas flag, except the red stripe was at the top and the white one at the bottom.

Not killing them might sound like a cowardly choice, but it was the right one. Winter was coming but it wasn’t yet here, so I could replace all of the meat. On the other hand, starting a fight would risk my life, the one thing I couldn’t replace. I had only just decided to let them leave unhindered, when I heard someone behind me. I turned around, and saw a man with an axe raised, trying to ambush me.

I cursed my luck. That’s about the last thing I remember until I was standing over the dying man with my bloody hunting knife in my hand, panting hard. His face was deeply lined, and there wasn’t much flesh on him. His clothing was dirty and in various stages of disrepair. He had a pistol tucked into his waistband, but when I took it from him I knew from the weight it had no ammunition. Three neat slits were grouped just under his sternum, spilling his lifeblood on the forest floor.

Every organism that survives has a strategy. These people didn’t farm or hunt or build or even bother to clean themselves. They were scavengers who killed any possible competition as casually as I might put down a zombie. What I did next may seem unnecessary to you, living in the second decade of the After Years, and contradictory, given what I previously said about preserving my life. You might argue that the man I killed did not represent his fellows, and in the First year of Plague I would have hoped for the same. But when one of them tried to kill me for no reason, I classed the whole group as predators; and some very hard experiences had taught me to deal with packs of predators harshly.

I zipped up the dead man's camouflage jacket to conceal his bloody shirt, and circled to the right to approach the RV downwind from his soon-to-be-zombie, and waited. I could see the bushes where I had left him and, when the body started to move in the dreamy, restless way that presages a new zombie, I threw one of my little decoys towards the camp. I set the thing to delay for sixty seconds, so about the same time the zombie was able to stand up, my voice began chanting, "Hey, don't chew me bro!", with about five seconds between repetitions. The two men with the RV turned at the sound and would have shot at it, if their guns had any ammunition. They tracked down the source of the noise, bayonets fixed to the ends of their rifles, and found the little black box. They laughed at it, because they thought it was a particularly bad alarm system.

The combined noise of the men and the machine drew the fresh zombie to them, while I used the same noise to cover my own movement. I can hit a man-sized target with my bow, reliably, from forty yards but that’s only if the target obliges me by standing still. From twenty yards I can hit a small apple, or a man-sized target that is running. I took partial cover behind a thick tree, knocked an arrow and fingered the rangefinder: the nearest bandit's head was twenty-one yards from me.

Soon enough, the dead fellow came wandering along. If there are no obvious wounds and the major bones are still intact, then a fresh zombie hardly looks dead at all from a distance. It looks like someone very sad is out for a walk and doesn’t want to talk to you. When they do notice you, the freshies are the most dangerous of zombies: they’re faster than standard and they have better eyesight. I drew my bow, and put my twenty-yard sight one inch above the center of the nearest raider's neck.

The doomed man said, “Turn that thing off! Jonsey, get back to your spot.” Judging from his tone he was the leader, or he thought he should be. The other man dropped the decoy on the ground and set to crushing it with the butt of his rifle, and that’s when I released the arrow.

It was a good release, the movement of a finger and nothing else except the string and the shaft. The arrow moved fast enough to leave little more than a suggestion of movement on the retinas, a blur that you would miss if you blinked. The broad sharp blades bit deep into the man's neck, and lodged in his spine. He fell over and screamed, or tried to anyway, and held his hands near the shaft he didn't dare touch or pull out. He weakened in moments, blood loss doing for him what the arrow had failed to do: stop his heart from working.

The last scavenger swore in alarm when he saw his boss collapse and ran in the opposite direction, straight into Jonsey’s zombie. Quick as a flash the wooden grip of the dead had him by the arm.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“Jonsey, what the fuck,” he said, looking over his shoulder instead of looking at his fellow, “Run!” My second arrow hit him square in the back. His body armor saved him from the arrow’s point, but the impact knocked him forward into the zombie's waiting arms. Jonsey’s teeth were on him, ripping flesh and tendons from his neck and face in a gout of blood. The man struggled, but blood loss would kill him now no matter what else happened. I took careful aim and finished all three scavengers, from a distance.

I did not immediately move from my spot behind the tree. There might be more scavengers, or nearby zombies may be drawn to the noise and carnage. I watched and listened. A couple of badly emaciated creatures with broken limbs emerged at ground level, crawling, thinking to dine on fresh remains, so I finished them as well. After ten solid minutes of nothing, I decided I could move cautiously.

After checking the rifles (no ammunition, again) the first job was to clear the RV. With my mace in one hand I knocked on the door as politely as I could with the other. “If anyone’s in there come out, hands first, and lay on the ground. All I want is my stuff back. Nobody else has to die today.” Nothing stirred. The curtains and windows were all closed, even around the driver’s compartment. “I’m coming in,” I announced, “Don’t give me any trouble, and I won’t kill you.”

I entered with a flashlight in one hand and my mace in the other. The inside of the RV was filthy and crowded with junk, like the people living there had never bothered to pick up a single piece of trash. My provisions were still neatly packed and stacked in the rear section of the vehicle. One of the boxes of oranges had been raided, but the cured meat looked undisturbed. For a brief moment I felt victorious, then clamped down on any impulse to celebrate until after the space was cleared. A large curtain separated the body of the vehicle from the cab area. I jerked back the cloth and shone my light into the cab in one motion.

What I found there was a girl, or perhaps a small woman, curled up in a fetal ball on the floor in front of the passenger seat, so shabbily dressed that at first I thought she was a heap of trash. She was as dirty as the rest of them, her once sky-blue dress the color of dust, and three sizes too big. Her straw-dry hair was shorn in ragged clumps. Her limbs were painfully thin. She didn’t make a noise or move a single muscle but lay there, dull green eyes on mine, waiting for me to kill her.

“Why didn’t you come out?” I demanded. Hesitantly, she showed me her left wrist. It was cuffed to the passenger door. I told her to stay put while I searched the rest of the RV. I needn’t have bothered: all I got for my trouble was an increased desire to wash. “I’m taking a look around,” I told her, “and I’ll be back in about ten or fifteen minutes. Then we’re going to talk about your future.” I gave her an orange and a somewhat wrinkly apple to eat, then went to retrieve the bicycle and the all-important reference books.

Finding the girl was a huge problem. Leaving her cuffed helplessly to an RV wasn’t an option, but I didn’t know if she could be trusted enough to turn loose or, even more problematically, come with me. Prisoners sometimes got attached to their captors, so she might not feel kindly towards the person who killed them. On the other hand, she might have people waiting for her somewhere nearby. As I rode the bike back to the vehicles, I still hadn’t decided on anything.

I sat for a while in the driver’s captain chair (after cleaning it with water and Febreeze), and watched the girl eat another apple. She clutched the fruit with both hands close to her body like it might be snatched away at any moment. Her age was hard to determine, accelerated as it was by malnutrition, abuse, and general lack of care. She didn’t even have shoes. I reminded myself that pitiful didn’t mean harmless.

“What’s your name?”

“Sandy,” she said between bites.

“Who were those guys I killed, Sandy?”

“Jonsey,” she said, not looking up from her food, “Jasper, and Dan.”

“How long have you been with them, Sandy?”

She shrugged. “Not long. Maybe ... a month? Two months? I don’t know days very good.”

“And before that? Where did you live?”

“In a big house. I belonged to Georgia and Carl. Then Dan killed them, and I belonged to him.”

“Were Georgia and Carl nicer to you than Dan?”

“The same,” she said, then ate the last bite of apple. She had eaten all of it except the stem and a few seeds. I gave her one of my peaches, from the recovered boxes. It was slightly overripe, but I was sure Sandy wouldn't care.

"Hold this but don't eat it yet. If you eat too fast, you'll get sick." She held the tender fruit cupped in both hands like it was a baby animal that might die from a moment of carelessness, her eyes glued to it in case it tried to jump out of her hands and get away.

“We have a couple of options here, Sandy. Option one, you can go free.” The girl became very still, but I pressed on. “I can give you food and water, maybe help you find a car. Then you go wherever you want to.” Her absolute stillness was a strange reaction to this offer. I had expected she would jump at the chance. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Not a nod. Not a word. Nothing.

I moved on, “Option two, you could come with me.” She looked up then, hopeful. “But there’s a problem with option two. How do I know you won’t attack me in my sleep?”

“You could handcuff me at night,” she offered, as if it were an obvious solution.

"You can eat it, slowly," I told her, to give myself time to think, "so you won't throw up. I don't have very many of those."

Locking her up at night was an appalling notion, but after the initial shock wore off I had to admit it was a workable solution. I didn't want to travel with this unknown person, but leaving her to her own devices felt adjacent to murder. Bringing her along without any safeguards was too reckless. But, the Sojourners were always looking for new people. If she wasn't crazy, if she could be rehabilitated into someone who could pull their own weight, then she might find a place with them.

Watching Sandy eat that peach was fascinating. The way she caressed the furred skin with her thumbs, savored the flesh and the juice with her eyes closed, then sucked the last remnants from the pit, she could have been the first person ever to each a peach and discover what bliss it was. Her face and her fingers dripped with juice. I couldn't help but grin, as I used the only clean-looking towel in the RV to wipe her face. Poor woman. Now I would have to give her all my peaches, because she was the only person in the world who could fully appreciate them. I had criminally undervalued the fruit for my entire life and didn't deserve them.

She searched my face as I cleaned her up. “If I sleep in handcuffs, can I belong to you?”

“All right Sandy,” I said, and took down the handcuff key from the hook by the door, “you belong to me now. I claim you, and you are mine.” I was quoting the Perfect Masters and their Tri-Fold Formulation of Mastery, who had their own special kind of crazy until Zombie Jesus ate them all. I could have just said 'yes', but those were the words that came to mind.

The girl was a cheerful worker but she needed a lot of remedial attention. She was too weak to carry anything very heavy, easily winded, and didn't always understand simple instructions. In spite of that we had the station wagon repacked in an hour and were back on the road. In the next town, we found a bike shop in pristine condition. That happened sometimes: you found a place completely untouched by the Plague, where you could imagine the owner was on vacation and would be back someday soon to turn on the lights and open shop. I found and equipped an e-bike for Sandy and selected some layers of high-performance clothing. When I told her to change she didn't head for the changing booths. Instead, she stripped on the spot, and I saw how dry her skin was, how wasted her muscles had become, the scars on her body where she had been whipped and cut. At the time I thought she was just excited about having a clean set of clothes, or her experience as a slave had burned away any sense of shame, but soon I would view her reaction in a very different light.

Shoes we got from a general sports store, where I also found her a camelback and stocked it like one of my own, and instructed her never to take it off except when she was sleeping. Then we hit up a CVS for a health check. The Scan-All was one of the last great achievements of the Before People. You could go to your local drug store, pay a little money, and they could scan a sample of your blood for a wide range of diseases and disorders. Sandy watched with unflinching fascination as I stuck her with a clean needle and drew blood into a test tube.

I powered the tester with a charged car battery and a homemade inverter, and in ten minutes I knew all about her. She had a sexually transmitted disease, curable with antibiotics. There were a lot of other problems with her blood work, but it looked like they could be solved with a better diet and less abuse. The CVS was out of antibiotics (and narcotics and everything else fun) but I had enough for a 30-day course stashed away in my pack. I got fifteen pages of incidental information and recommendations from the machine, including a notice that I should contact the local Health and Human Services office to arrange an interview, to determine if her living conditions were safe.

I gave the girl the first of the fourteen days of antibiotics recommended by the machine, from my own supply. It was unnerving how she would do anything I told her to do. If I told her to wear different clothes, then she changed clothes and threw the old ones aside. If I drew her blood, she sat and watched her blood fill the vial. If I gave her a pill, she swallowed it and didn’t ask what it was or what it would do to her.

I found a campground with a shower facility and its own well, and got the generator running. I told her to shower, and she showered. Then I had her stand guard while I did the same. I thought that if she was going to run away that day, that would be the time. But when I was done she was still there, scanning the area with binoculars in just the way I had instructed.

In the last hour of light we drove to the steepest hilltop nearby and made a hastily fortified camp. I found a chain long enough to let her lie down comfortably and looped it around a large tree, then closed one bracelet of the cuffs through the joined links. The other bracelet I put on her right wrist to let the left one heal. She held out her arm for this operation like a child asking for a treat, then snuggled down into her sleeping bag with every sign of being content.

I remember being acutely aware that night: of the girl; of our poorly prepared camp; of my discomfiture with our arrangement. I was disturbed by her lack of agency. The only other explanation for her instant obedience was an utter trust in me, a total stranger who might be planning to use her for anything.

Almost as bothersome as Sandy's lack of personal will, was my willingness to take her as a possession. I told myself I was giving her the help she was willing to accept, that it was only temporary and I would send her away as soon as she was healthy. But, after years alone, it was a fine feeling to have someone near enough talk to, even if we didn't use many words. She was easy enough to keep an eye on during the day. And tied to the tree at night, she couldn't surprise me while I was sleeping nor could she run off with my hard earned possessions.