17 Damned Codgers
I have recorded Jules's tale here, as well as I remember it. --E--
> When it started, I lived in New Jersey. Retired, still had my wife, grandkids all around. Life was winding down, but it was good. You know how it was. Then the plague started. I don't have to tell you about the losses. The sickness. The dying. The running scared, all the time, not understanding what was happening. My family turned right off, every last one of them, never had half a chance. I was the only one the plague didn't just kill.
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> A couple weeks in, a group of us holed up in an office building, about thirty in all. I would have called you an idiot if you said it then, but things hadn't gotten bad yet. People hadn't turned on each other: it was still humans versus zombies then. We thought the world had fallen apart. We didn't know it could break more.
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> So a bunch of us are in an office building, barricaded on the top four floors. Running out of food, but at least power and water still worked. We heard on the radio that the Army was airlifting people off the tops of buildings, so we moved up to the roof and lit flares. Next thing you know the entire emergency stairwell was stuffed full of undead. We set it on fire, closed the door, and camped on the roof as the helicopters came in to get us. It was a desperate move. The last group of us to leave got to see the building collapse from the air. I kid you not, it was that close.
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> They took us to a military base, and for a little while we thought things were going to be okay. Of course they didn't tell us much, ever. "Everything is under control. We're doing all we can." That kind of thing. Then the radios all went dead, and the food ran out, and winter was on its way. The day they nuked New York and it lit up the horizon, lots of people just gave up hope. I saw people lay down in their bunks or their tents, and just not get up any more till after they died.
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> The base was out in the country a little bit, in the hills. The soldiers did patrols and kept the zombies off us and the rest of us did what we could to help out around the camp. One day the million-zombie march showed up, some big migration from the cities that got nuked. Maybe they were running from the radiation, who knows? Million zombie march my ass, there were more than a million. You could look down the way from the lookout tower and see just an endless ocean of them. Biggest horde I've ever seen, to this day. The officer in charge, a colonel something-or-other, he wanted to make a stand to the last man. Fuck it all, you know? Man the fences and go out fighting.
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> This other officer, his X.O., shoots the colonel in the head and gives other orders: Move out. They load up the trucks with all the gas, food, and people they can carry. Put down the last of the incendiary mortar rounds to set the horde on fire: they don't burn well because the weather is all wet, but it slows them down and buys us time.
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> That man's name was Ludovic, and he saved four thousand people that day.
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> The soldiers take the women and children with them, and some of the men who are fit to fight. The rest of us they tell to get walking west. They'll leave signs to follow, and come pick us up as soon as they can. They even give us bayonets to fight with, and a few of us even got flack vests and helmets. Canteens of water. One MRE each. Not very damn much, you know, and some people got angry and tried to insist they should be on the trucks but the rest of us shout them down as cowards. Let the women and children live. We could hike out.
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> And that's what we did: we hiked it out. Longest walk of my life. We split up into battalions, companies, and squadrons and moved out, scavenging and fighting as we went, keeping in touch by walkie-talkie, avoided large cities and low areas. All told there were about thirty soldiers and fifteen hundred civilians. By that point the civilian/military distinction was pretty thin: if you could fight then you fought. If you could scout or scavenge then you did. If you couldn't do those things then you found something else to do. If you didn't do anything useful, you could leave or drop out at any time. A couple times men killed their fellows to take their belongings, food usually, and then took off. But mostly we stuck together.
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> Twice, Ludovic sent back trucks. The first time, we were coming down out of the Appalacians when the trucks showed up. There was a fight to see who could get on them, a real riot, and about a hundred people ended up dead. Ludovic's men had all the bullets, so they made all the rules. We drew lots to see who would ride and who would keep walking. I drew a ride, but I gave my spot to someone with family waiting wherever the soldiers had taken them. I knew my chances were shit, but here was a man with a wife and a toddler who needed him. I wasn't the only old guy to make that choice: loads of us had dropped out already, or just fallen behind and died. But those of us who were old and had our health chose to hoof it instead of take up a place better spent on men with more years in front of them. After the trucks left we didn't see Ludovic's people again for weeks, except a few left behind to march with us.
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> Us geezers formed up our own company, a hundred ten men and women, and we called ourselves the Damned Codgers. People had already been through the area, scavenged most of the gasoline, and there were still a lot of us to move. Maybe three hundred then, the Codgers plus two other companies. But sometimes we got enough gas together to move everyone at once, and we'd make good progress for a half hour or so until we met a roadblock or the gas ran out. Then we got lucky and scored whole convoy of school busses and a couple tanks of diesel. We crossed most of Kentucky just ploughing through any herd that got in our way. Normally you expect the gore to gum up the air system and stall the engine, but our busses had snorkeling gear on them. Don't know why: who puts snorkeling gear on their school busses? Clay County, that's apparently who. You had to stop once in a while and clean off the zombie meat cooking on the radiator, but as long as you did that you could run over as many as you wanted.
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> We ran out of gas practically right on the Tennessee border, a few miles from the river. We didn't have a way across, so we hoofed it some more. Fifty, sixty miles south I guess, until we hit where interstate one fifty-five crosses the river. Less than half of the Codgers made it in the end but man, we were some tough old folks. Like leather. We might all be slow, but we didn't have the fear on us like young ones did, and we would take on anything alive or dead. Not a single one of us would hesitate to die, if it let the others move on. That was our advantage.
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> Ludovic's men had a little fort at the bridge head, with concrete walls and a gate, and we caught our ride there. He took over one of those farming towns on the Old Miss flood plain: three big granary towers, a Main Street, and about a hundred houses. That was the whole town. Minus what we lost on the march, plus the new recruits that got picked up, there were thirty two hundred people. We all worked like crazy that whole fall: building walls, scrounging, planting anything we could harvest by winter.
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> Missouri was a mistake. To his credit, I think Ludovic knew it before anyone else, but by then it was too late in the year to move again and plant a new crop. When it got cold, zombies started to trickle in from St. Louis, then started to flood. At first the General, he promoted himself you see, lured them into narrow channels where he could fight them Roman Legion style. You put men into ranks ten deep with riot shields and spears, and circulate the front line to the back every three minutes. Fantastically effective. But the bodies would pile higher than we were and we had to give ground six inches at a time, then retreat long enough to burn the bodies and start it all over again standing on top of smoking-hot corpses. Or the zombies would find a way to our flanks. Or we'd just get plain too tired to fight any more. We were a tiny island of humanity in an ocean of undead. We couldn't keep up the pace and had to withdraw, and hope they could be lured around the town.
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> The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
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> That winter was so bitter, but it's what saved us. It starved us, but it also saved us. Frozen zombies don't hunt, so we got a reprieve to scavenge. The granaries were empty, because there was no harvest in the great American heartland that year, so our only food was what we could take from the cities a long ways off. Ludovic sent men in every direction, looking for the big three: food, fuel, and bullets. Saint Louis on a hard-cold day was the best bet, but you had to get there through the snow and do your scavenging at night. A couple teams never made it back.
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> As the food ran out we learned we were in a two-class system, if you didn't know it already: Ludovic's boys, and everyone else. Military got better rations, so it wasn't long before girls were selling themselves for a little more to eat. Mothers too, just to feed the kids. Husbands and fathers didn't like that one bit. A couple hundred people got sick of it and left on foot, winter or no winter, mostly family groups that had women they didn't want to share. The army started patrolling for "deserters", but people kept leaving anyway. A squad of soldiers tried to escape with a truck full of supplies, and they got shot. On Christmas Eve there was a riot: a few of the boys had a "party" with some girls who weren't, strictly speaking, consenting. Eighteen people got shot. Next day there was an assassination attempt on the General. December was a disaster. The whole thing nearly came apart.
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> There was a Codger named Jackson, a friend of mine, who had degrees in history and sociology, and he had Ludovic's ear. After the Christmas thing he says to the General, "What the hell are you doing? If you're going to run a city then you have to act more like a mayor and less like a general. Or else kiss the whole population goodbye because who wants to live here if it means starving while a bunch of guys point guns at you and fuck your wife?" Pretty much just like that, too. So they have this long conversation, and it all comes down to "build a civilization." A new one, because the old one won't be coming back.
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> And Jackson gets Ludovic to do things, like write down laws and appoint judges, set up a better bureaucracy, all very Hammurabi. He started taking new recruits into the army, made plans for a currency, and a bunch of other stuff. The first trial was for the Christmas Eve party boys, and he had them publicly whipped. If they did it again, they would be exiled or executed. Those were the new rules. Anyway, the town was still starving but at least we weren't at each others' throats.
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> The big problem was still Missouri. Good soil and rainfall, but too wide. Too flat. Impossible to defend against superior numbers. When the weather turned warm we didn't know what to expect: if all the zombies from Louisiana and Arkansas decided to follow Old Miss, we were done for.
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> Ludovic still had a small stockpile of food, and in January he apportioned a good chunk of it to groups he called "expeditionary detachments". The deal was you got fuel, food, and a shortwave radio. All you had to do was find a new place for a few thousand people to live in six weeks or less. The Damned Codgers signed up for that in a heartbeat.
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> The General sent groups south into Arkansas and Texas, east into Tennessee and Georgia, and some went west into Kansas and Nebraska. He sent the Codgers into the Rocky Mountains. The thinking was we could find a secure place in the mountains with a nearby city to scavenge from.
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> We had no trouble getting over the great plains, but when we got to Wyoming there was nothing there. Have you ever been to Wyoming? I'm telling you, don't bother. There's nothing there. Montana would have been worse, and the growing season too short, so we tried going south. We searched the whole front range of the Rockies, from Colorado to New Mexico. Colorado Springs nearly did us in, first with a bridge that gave out and dumped our bus into a river, and then again with warm weather that thawed out every single zombie, seemed like every deadder in the world was up and about while we were trying to get ourselves out of town. But we kept at it, and we radioed a report on every good site we found.
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> Ludovic learned a lot from the explorer reports, not just the Codgers. The entire eastern seaboard was radioactive zombies and flattened cities. The Appalachians got fallout from the east and, as if that weren't bad enough, whole mountains of coal were burning. I saw pictures, later on, and it was fucking Mordor. Multiple mountains, on fire. The smoke ran a hundred miles west if the wind was wrong. The Mississippi flood plain was a bad choice too: zombies get washed into the river then find their way out again in big packs downstream. You think you're safe with the river at your back, then one day a herd comes out of nowhere, wet as dogs and looking for lunch. The great plains have nothing worth salvaging, because they got nothing period. Half of Texas was still in a drought so you couldn't grow anything. The South was packed solid with plagued, lurking in the marshes and just hanging around in forests, waiting.
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> Anyway, we're doing our thing and in mid-February we got the word over the radio: they were coming to Estes Park.
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> Estes was the first decent place we found. It's a high mountain valley, seven-ish square miles. It used to be a summer resort: it's got some nice hotels and a small lake. Not a big population though, just a few thousand people. You get there on a long canyon road starting in Loveland, goes up about twenty five hundred feet but takes less than an hour in good weather. There's only a few ways into the valley, and they're all easy to block. Big enough for several thousand people, small enough to defend. Fort Collins, Cheyenne, Boulder, Denver, they're all day trips from there if you can keep the roads clear. Good gathering, when the weather is cold enough and the snow is not too deep.
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> So we're warming ourselves in Albuquerque when word comes down that Estes Park is the place, and we have to turn around and head back north. We have forty members left by then. A few died of natural causes on the road, and a couple we lost to bandits. The bandits must have thought we'd be easy, and came at us in the dark with guns blazing. Old people don't sleep for shit, so they failed to catch us much by surprise, and we did them in. Got a lot of ammo and gas for our trouble, too. Shame about Peggy, though. I liked that woman, I truly did. Still makes me angry to think about it, dumbshit yahoos killing her for what: a little gas and some moldy jerky?
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> As I was saying, we went back to Estes and cleaned the place out, just us. The trick is to tease out the zombies when the temperature is dropping to below freezing. You bring them down some narrow road where they can't get to your flanks, and you Roman Legion their undead asses. When it gets cold enough they freeze in place and you can rest. Then you can just walk around and take your time, finish off any that are left. Then you get someplace with a fire, eat and sleep, and do it all again the next day. We were good at it.
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> It's like racquetball. There's the young man's game, and the old man's game. The young man's got all the energy and speed. He's running all over the court, bouncing off the walls, doing heroic leaps, smacking the ball as hard as he can. The old man can't do that, so he has to play smart. Keep the kid running, don't let him line up any easy smashes, control every hit of the ball. That's what we did in Estes: we played Old Man's Racquetball against the horde. Our biggest problem was we had to take days off because our arms got so sore from stabbing zombies all night.
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> By March the tenth it's done. We're still forty Damned Codgers, minus a few fingers and toes from frostbite. When Ludovic shows up he's calling himself King Ludovic. He gives the Codgers medals for our service, and we get a nice lay-in for the rest of March and some of April.
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> After that, things are kinda nice for a while. People are fed. Justice is even handed, mostly. Never as much food as you want, but nobody starves to death. New Kingdom, he calls it! Pretty decent too, zombies and all. The king sets up towns along the front range, walls to keep the bad things out, a standing army to knock down the shambles. Government was high-handed, but it kept people mostly safe so they were willing to put up with it.
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> It started going bad again after Jackson died. King Ludovic's got no-one to tell him "no" any more. Nobody he trusts, anyway. Anyone who doesn't tell him he's the best thing that ever lived is a traitor. And he's hungry now, like he wasn't before. He's got a harem and his special guard and a palace and everything. He wants to expand, he says. He's going to rule America. Restore it. Whatever the fuck that means. The last asshole who wanted to restore America turned out to be crazy, and I figure this one isn't any different. He's worse, because there's no constitution any more.
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> I'll take my chances with the undead, thank you very much. Least they're honest about eating you, and don't ask you to thank them for the privilege. I'm the last Codger left, and His Eminence has no need for the very, very old so I'm allowed to leave. I picked these two up in a small-town drugstore. You say North California is too crowded, but I'd like to see this paradise where everything grows all year round. And I'll take these two with me as long as they'll have me.
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> I'm getting as far away from Ludovic as I can, and if you're smart you'll do the same the next time you hear his name. He might be holed up in his palace in Estes Park, but his reach has gotten long. I'm telling you, he wants all there is.