This story begins in silence.

It ends in thunder.

Between those two points, there is much blood and screaming.

Have you ever heard the saying “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is King”?

###

The story begins in silence. The silence of the dead.

Some stare up at the sky, others are face down on the asphalt. Bodies everywhere, in the infinite variety of positions the dead assume when they fall. Infinite variety blending into an infinite monotony of the dead. Each with two wounds to the skull. One massive, brains and bone exploding outward. One small and discrete, half an inch across, edges turning inward. They lie in heaps around the boarded-up convenience store, in the streets that approach this place. All are within fifty yards of this place. All show the bite marks of the walking dead.

“Nothing up here, boss.” Williams, on top of the convenience store. Big, strong, utterly loyal. How smart is he? Well, he’s big, strong and utterly loyal. “No shell casings, no bodies or bloodstains. Buncha these things tho.” He tosses a knot of white paper down to me. I pick it up, smell it. The smell of black powder. Crisp paper, tied at one end. The paper from a phone book.

“No fresh meat, just moaners.” Ashley, going over the bodies with mild curiousity, her fingerless black leather gloves letting her black-nailed fingers caress the corpses. “All these Z’s popped and they didn’t bag a single breeder. What gives?”

Goths are not usually as death oriented and morbid as they are said to be. Ashley, on the other hand, is a walking nightmare of a stereotype. She’d made me promise that when our mission was done, I’d be the one who killed her.

“Hey, I found a broken bell. And some wax paper.” Give Williams that, he’s methodical. Give me a field person who’s methodical and obedient. I’ll pass on the geniuses every time.

Lopez, his dark eyes watching all the approaches, always watchful, sidles over to me. “What happened here, boss?”

“They got on top of that store and they rang a bell.” I examine the bodies as I speak. Almost every wound came from above. “They rang a bell and the zombies came for dinner. Then, they started killing them at their leisure as the zombies milled around down here. Notice: every entrance to the store is barricaded. They probably went up the outside with a ladder. They didn’t even use modern weapons.”

I hold up the paper knot Williams had thrown down. “This is the paper cartridge from a muzzle loading rifle. They fire slowly. But you can make black powder almost anywhere, as much as you want. Never run out of ammunition. Of course, you have to have time to reload. They took their time, as much time as they wanted. When they ran out of zombies to kill, they went back down their ladder with their bell and the muskets and they went home.”

“Some people just don’t get with the program.” Lopez nodded. He was a quick learner. I think he’s gunning for my job. It’s a pretty safe bet he’s going to get it too. “This must be one of those “kill boxes” they been talking about.”

Ashley shakes her head. “Good thing those losers up at Cleveland weren’t doing something like this. We’d never have been able to whistle up enough zombies to take them out if they were doing shit like this.”

She looks over at one zombie who wanders near. It’s eyes are blank from the ultrasonics, the lizard hindbrain dormant, the feeding/aggression mechanism stilled. Thank goodness for ultrasonics.

Ashley walks over to him, strokes his bluish-green cheek. “There, there, baby, you’ll get to feed soon enough.”

###

We work for the Think Tank. The official name doesn’t matter. I can’t tell it to you. Not won’t.

Can’t.

All field teams are conditioned by drugs and hypnotism. They can reveal neither the existence or the location of the Think Tank to anyone not of The Project.

The Think Tank was made to face harsh truth: A world that is heaven for 6 million people is a living hell for 6 Billion. But how do you get it down to six million?

Oh, the Think Tank paid the bills with other projects, other research, all those government grants and private consulting contracts. But the central project always remained. How to dispose of the surplus population while preserving the superior core group?

Plague? Too random. As likely to kill the core group. Plus the human race was simply too adaptable, medical knowledge too distributed. Enough would survive to track down the core group and destroy it.

Nuclear War? A problem worse than the solution. Massive environmental damage, loss of knowledge, of art, of entire species.

Conventional wars? Pointless. In 1945, after 6 years of the human race trying to kill each other off with every weapon they could grab, there were still more human beings alive than there had been in 1939.

Then we found the Venus Plague.

It was on the probe from Venus that crashed. Was it from Venus? Or some microbe that had been mutated by radiation in space? We didn’t know. But it animated the dead. Brought them out of the ground, hungry and vicious, in several counties near Pittsburgh. The incident was hushed up, of course. Samples were sent to CDC for study. The Think Tank got it’s own samples. They made sure that the CDC’s batch was “accidentally” destroyed. Then they went to work.

Study the microbe. Study the walking dead. Find the tools to control them- the subsonic lures to draw them in, the subsonic beacons to pacify them. Find out every way to distribute the microbe quickly and stealthily.

It took decades and cost a fortune. Fortunately, the think tank had both. Plus utter dedication. Finally, we acted.

Newly capitolist China, with its unregulated medical system and transplant harvest was the natural start. Bribes could put you in anywhere. Infected organs could be scattered all over the world, usually with little or no monitoring. Infected immunizations, infected blood and plasma, all going out. All giving the microbe in such minute doses that it could take days, weeks even for the plague to manifest itself. Plenty of time to scramble the records.

Next step was the First World. Use those socialized medical systems and their centralized control to paralyze any response. Plant more incidents of the plague and use the media to spread just enough information to sow panic, not enough to guide effective responses. Our friends in the government were very busy, making reports disappear, making sure the wrong people got the right jobs.

Queens was our ultimate triumph. We started by co-opting the needles for junkies program. Infected needles were given to every junkie in the five boroughs. Raiding the New York City morgues and animating all their inmates, then sending them walking out on the streets. Paralyzing the police radio net for six crucial hours. Flooding the media with false reports. Oh, we were busy. I was busy. And on the higher levels, making sure that the Army response was too late, with the wrong weapons and commanded by a General who was energetic, completely in charge and an idiot.

Then sit back and make sure the results go on national television.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Some people simply refused to panic. Enter us, in three piece suits and government SUV’s and ID. A caravan of four SUV’s into any town where panic hadn’t taken hold. Go to the town hall where some mayor refused to panic, some crusty ex-soldier or police chief or sherriff was organizing a defense, where some man or woman was calmly speaking with a clear, loud voice and a plan.

Flash the ID. Tell them about a refugee camp set up just for them. Food, tents, medicine, army troops guarding it, a secure zone, but they have to get there right now or it’ll be taken away. Mutter some rumors of nuclear strikes or airstrikes on all the abandoned areas. Get them all in their cars, abandoning their homes and supplies, trooping hundreds of miles across panic-choked roads. They finish their journey with empty gas tanks in empty cornfields that our maps told them were refugee camps.

Ahhh, the fun.

Eventually, our field teams began to disappear. Someone had gotten wise. But now we had the locals shooting at the real government officials. That fitted our plan too.

Still, the human race just doesn’t know when to quit. Nearly a year after Queens, there are still hundreds of small communities standing off the zombie hordes. Tens of millions of surplus, useless human beings impeding our plan. Their greedy desire for their own survival distrupting our plan for humanities’ golden future.

So the field teams go out again. Go to the Blue Zones. Pose as survivors. Get inside. Make them fall apart. Like Cleveland. Get a three-way civil war going on in the enclave, while the beacon draws in a full-scale chain swarm attack, forty-thousand zombies storming the broken defenses. That was our latest success.

These guys would be small potatoes. We thought.

I threw down the empty paper cartridge. “Let’s get to work.”

###

We saw signs of the place a mile away. We were in a small city called Canton, Ohio, one of the rust belt cities. This had been one of the poorer neighborhoods, near downtown. Now, more than half the houses were gone, heaps of scorched boards with weeds growing on them. The old factory houses had burned like matchwood. More and more though, the basements were simply trash mounds, the smell of the dead still leeching up from them. Someone had been tearing down the houses, hauling them away, burying corpses in the basement under the trash of discarded ashphalt, plastic, cars and tires. Any large piece of uncovered earth was planted with beans, corn, squash. Indian corn, the seeds probably salvaged from some decoration. Clumps of dandelions, some of them obviously harvested for greens. Trees.

For once, a survivor group hadn’t been tearing down every tree in sight. Apparently, someone bothered to tell them that green wood makes lousy firewood. One tree was bearing fruit, mulberries thick on the branches.

We heard them before we saw them. I turned to Lopez. “I’ll do the infiltration. I need a clump of Z’s as cover. You take beacon two and the team, gather as many Z’s as you can about ten miles north of here and come at this place in three days. I want a nightime assault. In precisely 72 hours, I’ll light off beacon one. Got that?”

Lopez nodded. Beacon Two was our big job, unmistakeably some odd technology. Big unfolding antennas. Powered by a hand crank generator or solar panels, capable of drawing in every zombie for a twenty mile radius with ultrasonics on the right frequency. Mine was smaller, disguised as a boom box, with a ten mile range and less battery capacity.

I checked at myself in a nearby window. Male, mixed-race, thirties, short curly hair, average height, slender build, dressed in nondescript clothes, hiking boots, leather jacket, backpack, canteen, holstered Beretta 92 and a folding stock HK assault rifle over my shoulder. I handed the HK and the ammo bandoliers to Lopez, along with my spare field rations. I’ve passed for black, italian, east indian and hispanic on various jobs. This area, I’d stick with the light-skinned black persona.

Lopez shook his head. “You still look too healthy boss. Nobody gonna believe you ain’t outrunned a bunch of Z’s.”

“Just have them where I need them, Lopez. 72 hours. Move.”

Lopez goes. I light off my beacon, step away from it and hide in cover. I also activate my own ultrasonic.

The beacon draws in a hundred zombies in less than an hour. They come in eager, drawn by urges far beyond what is left of their minds. Any that got close to me went passive as my ultrasonic overrode the beacon.

A hundred was enough. I took out a knife, willed myself to control and stabbed myself in the thigh.

Gritting my teeth, I wondered if sometimes my dedication to the job was not excessive. I kept my blade up and down, between the tendons, not cutting them, near a vein. A nice bloody wound spilling down my slacks. Shame about them, I’d just looted them from a Gap. Can’t beat Tommy Hilfiger.

I walked to the beacon, shut it off and ran away as fast as my leg would help. The Z’s saw me then. There was a second as they made visual ID. Then those outside the range of my ultrasonics set up the moan. I staggered away as fast as possible.

I still had to be far out from this community to keep from being spotted. No chance of fooling people when you’re sitting unmolested in a mob of ghouls. As I hobbled away from the mob, my leg bleeding more, I wondered if I’d been too far out as a hundred zombies moaned and staggered in persuit of me.

I hobbled into the cleared areas a few minutes later. Every building knocked down except a few brick ones, clear fields of fire laid out. Metal light poles with bundles of scrap plastic heaped around them, some hanging from the poles. In the distance, an old school, ringed by barriers. A quarter mile away, dozens of people tearing down one more wooden house, ropes and blocks and tackle. I made a beeline for the school. Several minutes later, the first of the zombies emerged from the buildings and pursued me.

I should have known something was up. An alarm was raised instantly, of course. Any community this size would have one. The first screams began. But the working party kept at their job, after a brief gape in my direction. Only three men were sent after me, one with a wheelbarrow. Ahead, children and adults boiled from the buildings behind an odd fence, began mounting platforms. I saw the outlines of shovels against the sky, spears on top of the walls. Ahead, I realized there were pits and wire laid crisscross on the ground around the walls, ranks of punjii sticks set into the streets.

The guys with the wheelbarrow were breathing hard as they came to me. “Hop in man!” The lead guy was white, heavily muscled, iron grey hair in a widows’ peak, carrying a no-kidding sword at his belt, a heavy piece of metal. He also had a holstered pistol. They all did. He threw me in the wheelbarrow, breathing heavily. “Donner, your turn on the wheelbarrow next, let’s go!”

Donner was skinnier, mixed race like me. He hefted the wheelbarrow and we ran, not too difficult down the empty streets that ran between fields that had once been houses.

The cars were all gone. Where were the cars?

I saw that as we neard the buildings. The cars were on their sides, laid in overlapping order, wired together with power lines. Man-high barriers, flexible, fireproof, too heavy for even the largest zombie surge to move. They formed walls in a perimeter run between the buildings. I took it all in, bouncing in agony in the wheelbarrow as Donner pushed.

Donner grew winded quickly. The white guy shouted “Lucius, you’re up!”

I’d seen the third man, black, younger, pull his pistol out, drop behind. He aimed at the oncoming zombie mob. “In a minute, Conan! Got me some Z’s to service!” He opened fire.

I was relieved. These guys had so far seemed way too competent. But “Lucius” held the pistol sideways like some gangster video, blazing away at the mob. He emptied a 13 round clip. I think I saw one zombie go down. Lucius laughed. “I’m out! I need a reload!”

“Stay out here and get eaten, you idiot!” Fury all over his face, the first man grabbed my wheelbarrow, panting like a steam engine, pushing hard. We made it the last 50 yards to the walls and a gate. Chain link fence backed up by plywood. Lucius ran in ahead of us, pumping his arms like an olympic sprinter. The doors slammed shut behind us.

In seconds, there was someone bandaging the bloody wound on my leg. I ignored that, watched the people.

There was plenty of screaming and shouting, but none of it had the panicked note I was used to. The roof of the school swarmed with kids, teenagers, heaving rocks and bricks. One kid, a skinny dark shape against the sky, was pitching like Roger Clemens, small round stones. The rain of bricks and stones hit the zombies just as they began getting tangled up in the wire and stakes arrangement. It knocked down some with crushed skulls. On raised platforms a dozen more people were firing crossbows, steady aimed shots. In the distance, I heard a dozen rifles, the boom of black powder weapons.

I checked. Almost every adult had a pistol at their belt. I offered my Berretta to the medic. “If you guys are out of ammo-”

The medic grinned, a skinny black girl with big eyes. “We got lots of ammo. Only old Jack, he won’t let us use it. Not for small shit. There he go, doing his ‘Conan the Barbarian shit.’”

A knot of men stepped out of one building, the white haired older guy in the lead. They were strapping on what looked like bad copies of medieval armor, helmets with facemasks, all made from sheet metal. That rang real alarm bells. Sheet metal was not good against human weapons but no zombie ever risen could bite through it.

There were a dozen of them, carrying hatchets, crude maces or swords, short handed pitchforks and shields.

On the wall, I saw dozens of men and women on raised platforms, reaching over the wall with long-handled shovels, the shovel blades rising and falling in a deadly rhythm as they became coated with blood and brains. The mob of zombies rapidly diminished as skulls were crushed, heads chopped off.

A tall man, his skin dark ebony black, walked along the wall. Pistol in one hand, he watched the zombies outside the walls as they threw themselves forward to be destroyed. After things slowed down, he turned to the waiting men in armor, blew on a whistle. It’s piercing note punched through the crowd noise. The kids on the roof stopped throwing rocks. Everyone backed away from the gate as the men in armor formed a line. They threw the gate open.

The dozen or so zombies still moving swarmed in. Each was met by one of the men in armor. Maces swung, swords hacked down. The guys with pitchforks pinned the zombies in place, beheaded their targets with a single sword blow. “Jack” knocked his down with a shield buffet, then rammed his blade into it’s skull. That done, the men in armor marched out the gate, shoulder to shoulder, began finishing off the zombies trapped in the tanglewire, all very businesslike. The kids on the roof were cheering.

Nearby, Lucius was shouting at the tall black man with the whistle, dancing around, animated. “Clive, that white motherfucker left me out there to be eaten! He had his way, I’d be doing the ole’ shamble and moan right-”

His voice choked off. “Clive” had one massive hand around his throat. The man was bald, a thin mustache and goatee on his face. His voice was a low rumble. “Lucius, you hide. You hide right now! Because Jack is fittin’ to put your head on a stick right now and I don’t really feel like stopping him. Get your ignorant black ass out of my sight this second now and we may let you keep your gat!”

That looked promising.

Lucius ran off.

The hubbub gradually died down, crews of people with hooks and ropes dragging the dead off the wall, out of the defenses. They loaded the bodies on truck frames that had been turned into wagons. The tall black man turned to me, put out his hand. “Dude, you were draggin’ more zombies than we seen in a month. You down from Cleveland?”

I nodded, exhausted. The wound, I noticed, had been professionally bandaged. My Tommy Hilfigers were a total loss, however. “Been on the run for a week. Couldn’t seem to lose them. I’m Damon Harris.”

“Clive Haygood. You got any ammo for your pistol?”

“Yeah, but I ain’t giving it up. My gats’ only thing kept me alive. Only got six rounds left for it.”

“S’ight. We’ll top you off once things calm down. But rule number one: guns only come out when I call weapons free. Even when we got Z at the door. You pull that gun on anyone in this compound and we skin you. Literally. Got that?”

“Got it.”

A dog came by, a big mutt on a collar and leash, held by a middle aged woman handler. It sniffed at me, licked my hands. “He’s clean, Clive.”

The knot of men in armor came through the gate. Kids were waiting to dump buckets of water on them from the roof, washing off the blood and gore covering them. The kids laughed as they doused them. The men laughed back, enjoying the cool water in the summer heat. One man wasn’t laughing. You could feel the anger radiating from him like a fire as he stalked towards us. He pulled off his helmet. It was Jack.

“Clive, damnit, I want that idiots’ gun, I want it now. He can’t be trusted with a baseball bat, let alone a firearm.”

“Jack, I make those decisions. We can’t restrict firearms. What if he’s on the work detail and you get Z’s swarming out of some basement?”

“Take him off the working details and put him to work in here then! He’s fucking useless!”

“He says you’re riding him.”

“I am riding him! It’s the only way to keep him from sneaking off when we’re doing demolition! I swear Clive, give me his damn gun or-”

“Or you’ll what?” Clive was obviously fed up at being yelled at. “We held a vote old man! I am in charge! So what you going to do ‘or’?”

Jack glowered at the taller black man, then stomped off, rage and water dripping off him.

Clive shook his head, ran a big hand over his bald head.

Yes, this had potential.

###

Jack left with the demolition crew, talking about how he was really in a mood to smash things. Clive and a couple of other people spent forty minutes quizzing me about where I’d come from and what I’d seen. They took notes, checked the maps. I gave them the cover story I’d been practicing. The quiz ended when two trucks, one pulling trailers, came up to the walls. I smelled fish. I looked out the window. Baskets of carp, catfish, bluegills. Several boxes of rifles and ammo, a few more boxes of canned food. A dozen people with the group, all of them armed with rifles. The people of the community seemed happy to see them, but they seemed subdued.

The short black woman leading the group hopped off, hugged Clive. He was confused. “Mary, what happened? How’s you get the Meyers Lake people to give you all that?”

“They were all dead.” She controlled herself, with an effort. “No Z’s Clive, none at all. It was quiet when we went in. We found them all in the garage. They all locked themselves in the garage, put one of the truck exhausts to the vent and started it running. I think it just happened this morning. All of them Clive, the kids, the dogs, every one. So we stripped the place out, took everything that we could use..The babies, Clive, they killed the babies…”

The crowd grew still then, the mood darkening. Mary was crying. A young light-skinned boy ran up to her, hugged her, then an older red-haired woman as she began to cry harder.

Clive pushed himself away from the group. He pitched his voice to be heard. “The Meyers lake crowd gave up this morning. Nobody killed them but themselves! They had as much as we do, but they quit! If that’s what they want to do, we’re better off without them! Now if any of y’all want to quit, don’t bring that to me! We will never quit! There is no quit in this community! We are the living and we will continue to live! If they don’t want to live, we’ll take what they have and we’ll use it to live! We will continue to see tomorrow until every last Z is back in the earth where they belong and we can walk the streets unafraid!”

That actually picked up the crowd. I could see why they made this guy their leader. He patted “Mary” on the shoulder. “Go get some rest. We’ll unload this and have a fish fry. You rest until you’re ready to come back out.”

The fish fry came two hours later, to the smell of frying fish, woodsmoke and hot oil. Deep-fried cattail roots were the substitute for french fries as boards that had been torn from demolished buildings were used as fuel. Fish too small to fry were tossed into meat grinders and turned into fish cakes. Bowls of dandelion greens and mulberries rounded out the meal and if no one was able to stuff themselves, everyone did get a full meal. They ate in the school gym/cafeteria. Jack and Clive were at the head table with the little light-skinned boy I figured out was Marys’ son. Clive told the crowd that Mary would be down later but that she was fine. He finished the meal by giving out prizes to the teens and children who’d been throwing rocks. The lanky, dark-skinned boy with the good throwing arm turned out to be Clives’ son. He got a candy bar for having killed 3 zombies with his fastball pitches.

I wound up sitting by an older white man, his beard and mustache shaggy and grey. He set down a muzzle loading rifle and a sack of paper cartridges. He gave me a hard look, shrugged and sat down, began eating his serving of fried fish. He huffed through his mustache as Clives’ son took his candy bar. “Typical. Big surprise his kid gets the reward. I killed four zombies today guarding the demolition crew and my reward was jack shit.”

I leaned in and whispered to him. “Guy, you know these fuckin’ niggers is always cuttin’ each other slack.”

He looked at me in surprise. I grinned, leaned in closer. “Vinnie Tortelli. Pleased to meetcha. I’m from South Philly.”

He wasn’t adjusting quickly. “But ain’t you-”

“I ain’t no fucking spook. I play that sometimes cuz’ these nubians are always scratchin’ each others backs but I’m a paisan with a tan from Little Italy and don’t you forget it.”

He extended his hand, grinning. “Hal Thornton. Knew a sicilian from South Philly once, while I was in the army. Good guy.”

We ate for a few minutes, concentrating on the food. I nodded at his musket. “Who are you, the Confederate Army or something?”

Thornton chuckled. “Naw. They call us the Daniel Boone squad. ‘Bout a dozen of us with muzzle loaders. Think we’ve killed more zombies than everyone else here combined. Not that it gets us anything. At least Jack gave us some credits.”

“You ain’t gettin’ no credits either, long as Clive there is in charge.”

Thornton nodded. “I’ll tell you the truth, I’d be worried if I was you. Clive didn’t call you guys back during the attack. What if it had been bigger? Your ass woulda been hanging out in the breeze, with you guys out there on demolition.”

He nodded. “Clive don’t give a damn what happens to us. Never should have let him in. If Jack hadn’t vouched for him, Jack and Mary…”"

“Hey, he’s just one guy, right? One bullet in the middle of a firefight and Jack’d be back in charge, right? Accidents happen.”

Thornton gave me an odd look then. I could see the wheels turning. I’d finished my meal and I still had work to do. “Hell, don’t pay any attention to me, Hal, I’m just blowing smoke. But it might be more than smoke if Clive leaves you guys hanging again. He can’t be happy to know you guys are all still loyal to Jack. One thing these blacks know, it’s who’s in what gang.”

I left, my seeds planted there. I found my next target in an empty classroom, converted to bunks. Lucius was there, eating alone. I sat down with him, fished out a treasured flask of whiskey I carried. “’sup, Lucius? Yo man, thanks for tryin’ to shoot those Z’s today. Least you wasn’t going out like a punk.”

Lucius drank deep from the flask, nodded his head. “Straight up. That Jack, he’s one hateful motherfucker. If we weren’t all fighting these zombies, wouldn’t be surprised to find a white hood in his shit. He been riding me since the day I came in.”

Lucius looked at the fish, little more than a few bones and scales on the plate now. “Y’know that old ass man is probably eatin’ steak right now. I seen the supply rooms, all the canned food we bring in every day, stockpiled! All sorts of good shit. They keep saying they’re saving it for winter, that we got to eat whatever shit we scrounge up for now. But I’ll bet Jacks’ eatin’ the fuck out of it. Just like we can’t use real ammo! We got a ton of real bullets and we never shoot it! Say they gots to save it for a major attack. Like today wan’t a major attack! They won’t even give me a reload for my pistol!”

I reach into a hidden pocket, pull out a hoarded box of 9mm jacketed hollowpoints and hand it to him. “Dog, Jack ain’t bulletproof, is he? Shooting starts, a bullet goes stray..”

Lucius grinned, a hungry look in his eye. Then fear washed over him. “Naw, if that happened, Clive would-”

“Clive would be glad there’s one less old white motherfucker to give him shit. Can’t do it his own self, might piss off the white dudes but there ain’t so many of them anymore. Might even have a li’l sum-sumthin’ for the cat who did it, once things calm down.”

Lucius gave me a look I was familiar with. Perfect.

###

I’d intended to work on more during the next 48 hours, but it didn’t work that way. The Meyers lake community had to be stripped of useable supplies. Since there was almost no fuel left, that meant a daylong trek with people hauling wagons and carts. Every hand, including mine was needed. It also meant guards standing by with rifles to repel wandering zombies. The Daniel Boone squad was a major part of that.

I worked that for what it was worth, pointing out to black people hauling wagons that the Daniel Boone squad was all white. After a few hours of hauling, watching their guards standing while they worked, it was easy for them to forget that those guards had to stand alert to watch for zombies. It helped that the team beacon was drawing in all the local zombies, so that the guards never actually had a threat to shoot at. By the end of the second day, we were calling ourselves the chain gang. Of course, I also slipped in a few reminders to the guards of how ungrateful these people were for them protecting them. The trick was to never let one group see me talking to the other group.

It was four pm on the third day when I lit off my beacon. We finished pushing back the wagons loaded with loot from the Meyers lake community around 3pm. My beacon was missing from my rack. For one tense hour searched like crazy, until I discovered Lucius had stolen it. He turned it over, angry that it wouldn’t play his CD’s, wondering why I carried around a boom box with a dead battery. Then I lit off the signal and put it on the room of the school building. Not as easy as I thought it would be. A legless, wheelchair-bound sentry was up there with binoculars, but I managed.

The tall dark-skinned boy and the little light-skinned boy were looking at me as I came down from the room. Funny how they’d be hanging together, the way their fathers’ fought. For a moment, I thought of them being ripped apart, devoured screaming by zombies. Imagined them staggering around as bloody, hungry child corpses. With an effort, I put that image out of my mind.

“What were you doing up on the roof?” The tall dark child.

“Just getting some air. You two play a lot together?”

They shrugged. I left, knowing that the clock was ticking.

The dogs on the fence were edgy. The beacons had that effect on them. As the work details come in and the fence was secured, half a dozen zombies emerged from random points, staggering towards the fences as fast as their rotting bodies could carry them. Zombies will go dormant for weeks at a time, the chemicals that activate their remaining nerves depleted, only slowly recharging even in their turgid metabolism. But now the beacon brought them out. They were quickly dispatched.

It was a late july sunset, the nightly games of basketball and bridge and spades keeping the residents of this little fortress entertained when the zombies really started coming in. Scattered ones, not clumps, each one raising the moan that drew in others, the start of a chain swarm attack. The alert went up and everyone went to battle stations. Clive spoke to the group. “I need a dozen healthy men to help the Daniel Boone squad haul ammo to kill box four. All these zombies are trooping by it. They’re going to slow down the attack, but that’ll use up a lot of ammo. Who’ll volunteer?”

I volunteered, of course. We all took double loads of ammo for our pistols, pushed carts of paper cartridges and torches through the city streets, past the pits and farm plots that used to be houses. The squad was using modern rifles to get us through, semiautos that had been stored for this occasion. They were still busy, even though we kept to open fire lanes. Kill box four was a mile away, an old gas station, barricaded again. Torches were lit on the approaching streets to light targets. The ground floor was being used to store dry firewood for the winter. I helped them pass the supplies up to the roof, leaving two little presents of my own shoved into the ground floor. I even got to talk to Thornton.

“Sounds like your ass is left hanging in the breeze again.”

He shook his head. “At least this time we got a phone line back to the school. Maybe I’ll make an obscene phone call to Clive.”

Our smaller detail, running back to the school, still used up most of our pistol ammo against the steadily increasing tide. Shambling, swaying armless corpses emerging from shadows, from side streets. Behind us, we heard the Daniel Boone squad open fire with their muzzle loaders. As we ran, we lit off pre-set bonfires of paper and plastic, to provide light for the people shooting from the school.

Night fell with the guttering, smoky bonfires illuminating swarms of the undead coming in. First one, then another, then two or three, swaying and staggering. Black shapes outlined by the fires or with some of their features illuminated, their mutilations and rot and blood. All of them moving with that unstoppable slowness, a wave of rotted bodies, jagged teeth, mindless hunger. Three became ten, then twenty, then fifty, their forms growing together slowly into clumps.

Columns of black, vile smoke rise to the sky.

All the ammunition had been broken out now. Clive gave weapons free to a dozen marksmen with rifles. They began picking off zombies at a hundred yards. Only a few zombies were making it to the wire, through the hail of stones and the obstacles. The people with shovels finished them off. I checked the load in my pistol, slipped away to where I’d stashed my gear. One more step. I went up to the command post, found Lucius hiding outside it. He was scared. Truly scared. Perfect.

In a command post set up on the room, Thorntons voice was coming loud and clear over the phone. “It’s some kind of fire below, in the firewood! Damn things burning through the roof!”

Ahh, the little surprises I’d left. Timed incendiaries are so much fun.

Clive spoke into the phone. “How’d that happen? Was somebody smoking?”

” Smoking what, you dumb bastard? We ain’t seen tobacco in six months! It’s the roof that’s fucking smoking!”

Jack was there too, in full armor. “Clive, ask him if they can break and run.”

Clive glared at him, spoke. Thorntons’ reply was obscene and full of anger and fear. “We got wall to wall corpses around us, damnit! We can’t shoot our way out alone and this fuckin’ building is burning! Get us the hell out of here!”

Jack nodded. “We’re armored up. I’ll get the boys rolling. We’ll need cover fire.”

Clive put a big hand on his shoulder. “Negits, Jack. That’s over a mile. We’re close to wall to wall Z’s here. You go out there and they’ll swarm you. If I let you die that way, Mary will kill my ass.”

Jack glowered, wanting to argue but staying silent. Thornton took it more personally. “Damnit you fuckin’ nigger, don’t leave our ass hangin’ in the breeze! You’re letting us die because we’re all white here and I know it!”

Jack turned on Clive, his big sword in his hand as I slipped towards the room chimney that Lucius was hiding behind, an eager grin on his face as he watched the argument. “Clive, we can’t leave them out there!”

Thorntons’ voice was rising in panic. “Oh hell, oh sweet janey, the roofs starting to collapse, it’s burning and-” I heard screams over the phone, screams that rose above the sound of the rifles, the moaning of the zombies in the distance. .

Jack hefted his sword in reflex.

I whispered to Lucius. “He’s about to cut him Lucius. Shoot old Jack and you’ll save Lucius’ life!”

Lucius stepped forward, aimed- and then I heard the click of a safety. A woman’s voice. Mary, her dark skin blending into the shadow haunted night. “Lucius, put that gun down or I’ll kill you.”

Lucius dropped the gun. I reached for mine, only to face the barrel of Mary’s’ pistol. Clive and Lucius both looked towards me at the sound of the black womans’ voice. Behind her, I saw the two boys, one holding my beacon, it’s back removed. My hands went up.

“Clive, Jack, come over here. Little Clive, show your uncle what you found.”

The light skinned boy handed my beacon to Clive. Jack looked in the back too. In the distance, there was a calls for weapons free, the rising moan of hundreds, thousands of zombies calling each other to feed.

Clive looked at me. “This doesn’t look like any radio I’ve ever seen.”

Lucius spoke. “Batteries are dead in it. I tried to listen to it.”

Jack spoke. “It’s got power. Some kind of lithium batteries, big ones. Honey, where did you find this?”

“Honey” was apparently Mary. “Your son and his cousin found it on the roof after this man left it here this afternoon. They could tell something was up.”

Lucius spoke up again. “This dude was telling me to shoot Jack. Said he was going to kill Clive.”

Jack came closer, held Mary to him protectively. “Kill my own brother in law? Naw. Kick his ass, maybe. Mary would be mad if I killed him.”

“And my sister has you seriously pussy whipped, you old fart.” Clive came closer, studying me as Jack pulled the pistol from my belt. “So what is this radio? And who are you?”

Jack smashed the beacon to splinters. That caused another argument. A family argument. While their two sons, cousins, watched me. While Jacks’ wife, Lucius’ sister, held the pistol on me and told them to stop arguing. I knew I was screwed. I didn’t need a gun. My personal ultrasonic would protect me beyond the wall. I turned and ran.

Marys’ first shot shattered my kneecap. I went down on the school room, rough gravel and asphalt scraping my face, my hands.

In the distance, I heard the moans of zombies and Clive shouting “weapons free!”

It is an hour later and I am now the one eyed man. Literally. They have survived and survival has made them harsh. They want answers. I cannot give them answers. They keep asking. I know the answers. I babble, I beg, I utter nonsense phrases. I cannot break my conditioning, not even as I scream from the pain of their interrogation.

Outside the steady thunder of the guns is slowing as even their hoarded ammunition begins to run low. The zombies no longer need the beacon. They come forward in a massive chain swarm attack, drawn by the thunder of the guns. A tide of snatching hands, biting teeth, dead staring white eyes. My final mission may still succeed, but I will not live to see that. Not knowing my mission, not knowing what is truly happening, they have still caught me.

And in this valley of the blind, the one eyed man shall not become king.

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