Lord of the Dead Read online

  One was wearing a state patrolman’s uniform. Part of his face was eaten away, along with his shoulder on that same side. Another was a woman in a ragged dress. Any of her exposed skin looked greenish—gray from exposure to the cold. The final one of this pack was a young boy. He was wearing footy pajamas with the soles worn through. His face showed sign of deep scratches.

  As we had drilled so many times, we took up our modified positions, accounting for a three-person team, not a four-man, and we waited for them to come to us.

  The drifted snow worked completely in our favor for our current position. The woman wasn’t very tall, so she had trouble making steady headway towards us. The boy fell every third step, but the patrolman was doing well.

  Greg stepped up and waited as Brandon, and I moved back a step so that we had good coverage in case another set of undead came at us from a different side. The patrolman broke through the final pile of snow but slipped on the icy driveway, falling face down. As it rose to its hands and knees, Greg moved forward, bringing his ax over his head, and then swinging it down quickly. It connected with the top of the patrolman’s head with a sickening noise, and the zombie went flat against the driveway. It tried to push off the ground, but Greg brought the ax down again, and it went still.

  Brandon and I stepped forward but took defensive positions as we waited on the other two zombies. He got the woman, and I got the boy. I got the bad luck of the draw. I hated having to take out the zombie kids. None of us did, but it had to be done.

  The woman broke free of the snow, but Brandon cut her down with a vicious slice of his sword. It took him one extra whack, and she was out of commission.

  The boy crawled towards me on all fours after failing to stay upright for more than a few feet. He climbed over the snow pile along the side of the driveway and rolled down it, ending face-up just a few feet away from me. His footy pajamas were the type that only kids wore and were badly stained. I could only imagine the source of the stains. Even through the dark blotches, I could make out the Star Wars characters dotted across the pajamas. It was my role to move up and take him out, but something in me hesitated.

  “Joel, move up, and take it out,” Greg said quietly, but my feet didn’t want to move.

  The zombie boy slipped several times on the ice as it tried to right itself.

  “Do you need me to do this?” Greg asked.

  “No, I’ve got it,” I said as I moved forward, pulling my bat back.

  The zombie boy made it to a kneeling position and snarled at me as I got to within an arm’s reach. I brought the bat down, and the top of the thing’s skull collapsed upon impact, sending it to the driveway where it went still. It was so much easier to think of them as “its” or “things,” but the kids made it harder to do that.

  “Good job,” Greg said, “let’s get the next ones to come to us.” He moved up and tapped his ax against the metal bars of the fence. It didn’t sound like a dinner bell or a chime, but it was enough to get the next group of zombies’ attention, and they came like green wraiths out of the darkness.

  The procession of zombies lasted about an hour as singles or pairs came at us, trudging unsteadily through the snow. Between each group, Greg would ring the dinner bell by rapping his ax on the fence. We each took our place as a killing machine while the zombies trudged over the snow pile along the side of the driveway. The pile of undead got so large that we had to pull the bodies away from the side and into the center of the driveway to allow room for the next set of moving ones.

  The ones still stumbling our way never took notice of the ones we had taken out. They wanted us; their undead brethren were nothing but superfluous postscripts to be ignored. That was one of their strengths: their ability not to care about anyone or anything. They surrendered themselves totally to their hunger. Some might call it dedication.

  Like a well-oiled machine, we went at our work, cheerlessly chopping, swinging, and bashing. It was an efficient way to take them out, and there were only a couple times that it got sticky, but Greg stepped up and made sure nothing went south.

  Greg checked in with the guard towers and rooms periodically, getting an assessment of how many undead were still out there. He also had them check on possible interlopers from the backside of the compound. It seems that the ruckus we were making out front drew them like used cars salesmen to a cheap suit.

  Their numbers dwindled along with our stamina. After years of loving baseball, I never envisioned a time when I would be using my bat time and again to bash in the heads of zombies. It sort of took the joy out of my devotion to the sport.

  “How many more?” Greg asked into his walkie-talkie.

  I looked his way as I prepared to swing at a delivery man wearing a UPS uniform that was tattered and stained with what must have been dried blood. Bite-sized chunks were missing from his arms; plus he had a couple of bullet holes in his stomach, but like the Energizer bunny, he just kept going, albeit slow and jerky in this bitter cold. As he reached the top of the snow pile, he lost his balance and slid face first into the driveway. Brandon waved me off as I approached. He brought his sword up over his head and swung it down with brutal force on the UPS guy’s neck. It was a clean blow, severing the head from the body and sending it sliding down the driveway.

  Unlike in some of the zombie flicks, the torso didn’t keep on moving. Once the brain was disconnected from the body, the body was out of commission. We had noticed that the heads would sometimes continue to function for a couple of minutes: the jaws moving and the eyes blinking, but it ceased to function within minutes.

  “I think that’s it,” Greg said, “we’ll stay out here for a couple more minutes and make sure.”

  There were just over thirty zombie bodies lying in the driveway. Some were missing limbs. Others were missing heads. Some had crushed skulls. Darkish red blood that looked greenish black through our night vision goggles oozed out of many of the bodies, congealing in the ice and snow.

  It’s funny how people’s perspective changes. The whole scene was not out of the ordinary for us. Just over a year ago, we would have been driven stark raving mad by the task we had just handled. Now, it was all in a day’s work.

  Inside, I wondered what it was doing to us. The endless killing of the undead. Then decided it was best not to go there.

  “Greg, what are we going to do with these guys?” I asked referencing the attackers from earlier in the day.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “I hated having to come back out here and take care of this mess, but it has allowed our heads to cool down. It also allows us to see that living and breathing humans are in short supply in this world. Just killing those guys…well, it seems wrong, but….”

  I picked up where he trailed off, “But when it comes down to it, those guys are more dangerous than the zombies because they can think and plan. These deaders,” I said pointing my bat to the piles of bodies,” they just move on base instinct. Still, I see your point.”

  “You know where I stand,” Brandon said, “but I’ll live with what the group decides.”

  “I guess we’ll find out what the group says tomorrow,” Greg said looking off into the darkness at the nothingness of the night.

  Chapter 5

  The Trial

  “If we let them go, we could end up right where we were: with them ready to shoot us for our supplies,” Brandon said, his face overheated.

  “But do we have the right to kill them?” Kara asked as much to the crowd as to Brandon.

  At the trial, which would decide the fate of the marauders who had attacked us, the discussion bounced back and forth for nearly a half an hour. Every time, the discussion came back to the practical issue of survival versus the more theological and philosophical ideas of whether we had the right to make decisions of life and death.

  Brother Ed stood up from his seat among the onlookers in a dramatic way, his arms raised, and said, “Exodus clearly states that anyone who strikes a man and kills him shall certainly
be put to death. Even though these men didn’t kill any of us, they clearly would have. There is no other way.”

  Hub Underhill stood and asked, “‘Thou shall not kill,’ but what about that?”

  “If a person studies Hebrew, he will find the word kill actually translates as murder, not kill,” Brother Ed shot back in a chiding tone.

  “Gentleman, thanks for your contributions,” Greg said, patting the air in a motion requesting the men take their seats. Greg, Hub, Kara, Travis, Brandon, Doc Wilson, and I sat at the front of the crowd behind a long wooden table. The dining room tables had been pushed back, and most of our fifty plus people, excluding the younger children, were crowded around the table in metal folding chairs. Two of Travis’ crew were on guard duty in the basement where they were keeping the marauders contained. Aaron, who was already in the infirmary, joyfully stood watch over the wounded marauder in Doc Wilson’s care. I worried his trigger finger might get too itchy, but he restrained himself.

  I felt out of place at the table with the adults, but Greg had insisted. How I got there was beyond me, but prior to the debate about the fate of the men, Greg had brought up the issue of a more formal leadership structure for the people at The Manor. The crowd made nominations, and after some deliberation, a seven-person panel of leadership was elected. To my surprise and horror, I turned out to be one of the seven members.

  “Again, I go back to what a decision like this will do to us,” Kara said. “Handing out the judgment of death on these men and carrying it out will change us and, I fear, not for the better.”

  Jo stood from her seat in the audience with her hand raised, and Greg acknowledged her. “If we do decide to execute them, how will we do it? And who will do it?”

  That was the real showstopper. Who in our group had the actual nerve to pull the trigger on another unarmed and defenseless human being?

  “It seems we could go on all night with this debate, but a decision needs to be made, and we shouldn’t put it off,” Greg said, “agreed?” He looked to the leadership panel, and we nodded. “Do we use a secret ballot or do we have a public vote?”

  Before he could answer, Ethan, one of Travis’ men guarding the marauders in the basement, rushed into the room with a shotgun in his hands. His face was ashen, and he had trouble speaking.

  “What is it, man?” Brother Ed asked.

  “One of the men,” Ethan said, his expression vacant and lost, “he killed himself.”

  “How did this happen?” Greg asked as we stood outside the open metal door of a storage room in the basement. Ethan, a medium-sized guy with a thin beard and mustache, held his flashlight trained into the room illuminating one of the marauders hanging from an extension cord: legs dangling in the air, face purple and his tongue protruding. The end of the extension cord was wrapped around a large metal pipe that ran the length of the ceiling and disappeared into the wall. This marauder looked to be seventeen or eighteen, a kid really.

  The marauder had lost control of his bowels and bladder, the odor drifting out of the room. I fought down the bile coming up into my throat.

  Ethan started, “We put each one in three different rooms. This guy was acting up, so we separated him out and put him in this storage closet. We had no idea….”

  “All right, people, we don’t all need to look,” Greg said to the crowd. “We’ll get this taken care of and recommence with our proceedings,” he stopped to look at his watch,” in one hour.”

  It took five minutes before the bulk of the crowd left the basement, leaving Greg, Travis, Kara, Brandon, and me with Ethan and the other two guards.

  “Did he seem upset or just combative?” Greg asked.

  “Both, but not too out of hand,” Ethan said.

  Greg opened his mouth to speak but stopped when a pounding noise started down the dark corridor, followed by shouting.

  “What’s going on out there? You don’t have a right to keep us like this?” The shouting was muffled.

  “Those are the other prisoners,” Larry, one of the other guards, said. He was an older guy with gray hair and a round face. “They’re down the hall.” He shined his flashlight on a closed metal door just about twenty feet away as he led us down the corridor. Boxes and supplies were stacked neatly against the walls.

  As soon as we got to the door, Larry fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He picked through them and opened the door. Almost immediately, two bearded faces appeared in the flashlight beams, blinking and bleached out from the light.

  “You ain’t got no right to keep us down here,” one of them shouted. He was missing a couple of bottom teeth, and his eyes looked wild and angry.

  “We can do whatever we want with you,” Brandon shouted back, “after you did what you did.”

  “That wasn’t my idea,” the man said. “We was just coming to ask for food. Jimmy’s the one that pulled the gun on you.”

  “You’re a bad liar,” Brandon replied, “you guys had planned to attack us from the start.”

  “Don’t you call me no liar.”

  “I’ll call you whatever I want.” Brandon raised his pistol.

  Greg stepped in front of Brandon and gently pushed him back. “Let’s settle down, okay?”

  The other man who looked to be in his twenties had thick, shoulder-length hair and a bushy beard but no mustache asked, “Where’s Howard? Where’d you take my brother?”

  Greg looked to Ethan, and he nodded.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ll come right out with it. I’m sorry, but your brother took his own life,” Greg said.

  “No, no,” the man shouted as he surged past the other man, trying to get into the hall. Ethan and Larry stepped forward with shotguns and used them to push the man back into the small room where he collided with the other man, knocking them both to the ground.

  “He wouldn’t do that. He just wouldn’t,” the man cried out. “You killed him. You fuckers took him and killed him.” He started to get back up, but Ethan and Larry both snapped their shotguns into position, and the first man pulled his friend back to the ground.

  “We did not kill your brother,” Greg said, “he hanged himself with an extension cord.”

  The man was quiet for a moment and then looked up, angry, hot tears rolling down his cheeks. “If you didn’t kill him outright, you did it anyway. He was scared you’d torture us. He wasn’t strong like the rest of us. It’s your fault.” At this, he started to get up again and broke free from his friend’s hands and stumbled forward toward us.

  Greg pushed his way past Ethan and Larry and brought the butt end of his rifle up in a slapping motion, ramming it into the man’s abdomen. The man’s eyes and mouth opened wide, air shooting out of his mouth, and he fell back into the room, gasping for breath.

  “What your brother did was his own choice,” Greg said. “Coming here and attacking us even after we offered you supplies was your choice. We are choosing to defend ourselves, and we will determine what happens to you for your aggression.”

  He turned to Ethan and Larry and said, “Separate them out. Make sure you secure their hands.” He looked back to the rest of us. “Let’s go upstairs and get this over with.” He pushed through the group and walked down the corridor, his boots clicking off the hard concrete floor. There was a noticeable slump in his shoulders.

  It took longer than an hour for things to settle down. The leadership group assembled in the dining hall again, along with a great deal of the people from earlier, but the group was noticeably smaller. Greg informed those that hadn’t gone downstairs with us what had transpired. A few looked down, some shook their heads, while others had a relieved look on their faces.

  “Before we were interrupted, we were about to decide the fate of our prisoners. Since we are your leadership,” he said, his hand directed toward those of us sitting up front at the table, “we will take an open vote of what we should do. It seems clear to me that there are only two viable options: Execute them or release
them. What I mean by release is that we will take them away from here several miles and release them without their vehicle or any weapons. Anyone see any other alternative?”

  No one else offered an alternative, but Kara asked, “Isn’t releasing them the same as killing them? What chance do they have without a vehicle or guns?”

  “A better chance than if we execute them,” Greg said.

  Kara started to open her mouth but stopped.

  Greg said, “I’ll get the voting started. My vote is to execute them. They are too much of a threat.”

  Kara sat beside Greg and spoke next. “I’m not in favor of either of our choices because I believe in the same redemption that God has offered us, but it seems that can’t be an option, so I’ll vote for release.” She paused for a moment, and then added, “But I’ll pray they make it safely back to their people.

  Brandon was next in line, and he was short and sweet. “Execute.”

  Hub was next and took a moment to speak. “I’m sorry. This is a hard decision. I vote for release. I can’t see myself shooting them, and I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do what I wouldn’t do myself.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad, but I vote to execute,” Travis said. “I guess if I had to pull the trigger on them, I would.”

  Doc Wilson was clearly uncomfortable, fidgeting in his seat. “If you wanted me to vote on things like this, then you shouldn’t have elected me to leadership because as a physician, I can’t go against my oath and have people killed like this. My vote is for release.”

  Three to three. There’s a reason you don’t pick the end chair.

  All eyes were on me, and all I could wonder was why I had been selected for leadership at all. I wasn’t leadership material. I could barely take care of myself, but none of that mattered. The vote was to me, and the fate of these men’s lives lay in my hands.