The Short Zombie War: Chapter 1

Mary Adams

Mary Adams doesn’t look like a zombie fighter. She’s five foot two, and does indeed have eyes of blue, but her shoulder-length hair is white and her glasses are thick. She was reluctant to talk to me at first, pointing out that Mike Tester lived just ten miles away. Of course, Mike’s story has been told a dozen times, and one expects a Marine to be a zombie fighter. A little old lady, though …

How did it start? For you, I mean.

Like it did with everybody. I heard those reports of zombies, and I thought it was one of those EAS things.

Emergency Alert System videos, right?

Yes, and podcasts. You know the ones, reporting like Yellowstone’s erupting, World War Three’s started … and zombies are loose in New York City. Then the videos came out, and, well, AI video generation has gotten awfully good. But I started to doubt, because that quality of AI is expensive. Much too expensive for somebody’s little Twitter account.

Other people were doubting, too. Not that anyone said much, but there was a run on ammo at Walmart, and plywood was sold out all over town. People were getting ready to fort up.

Anyway, we had our weekly bridge game, here in the neighborhood. Not a lot of young people play bridge — too much human contact, I guess — but we do. Some people — not naming names, here — were starting to panic, talking about fleeing to Canada, like in the books.

She shakes her head and smiles.

So I said, in the books, you end up without food or shelter, freezing and eating whoever freezes first. No thanks! Me, I’m staying right here. Anna — she lives down the street — Anna says she’s staying and Rob — that’s her husband — he’s putting plywood over the windows.

She shakes her head again.

But that won’t work, I tell them, because suburban houses like ours don’t make good forts. Too many windows, too many doors, and plywood’s just not good enough. You get a swarm of zombies pounding on your boarded-up windows, and they’re going to break in. You’ll be sitting there with your pistols while the zombies smash their way in, and maybe you’ll shoot some, but they’ll get you for sure.

That didn’t go over well. “What are you going to do, then?” they want to know. So I said, “I’m going to use my brains.” Naturally, Jason — he’s Sarah’s son, and she was hosting the bridge party — naturally, Jason was walking by the door just then, so he says “Brrainssss, brrainssss.”

She rolls her eyes.

That actually lightened the mood, you know. How can you panic over this kind of nonsense? And he kept up those stupid zombie jokes all through the war. At one point, Max — that’s his father — threatened to toss him to the zombies if he didn’t knock it off.

Anyway, getting back to the bridge party, I pointed out that zombies are people, or were, so they have people-type abilities. They can’t fly. They can’t climb your house without a ladder. So me, I’m going to pack my go-bag with food, water, meds, and ammo, and set a ladder against the house. Then when the zombies come, I’m going to be sitting on the roof with my ladder up there with me, and I’ll be sniping those zombies while they can’t touch me.

She shrugs.

It’s the same thing Mike Tester advised, “Climb up, shoot down.” But nobody’d heard of him then. We talked it over some more, and even the people who were panicking, they saw my point. We sent Jason out to round up anyone he could find in the neighborhood — the kid might as well make himself useful — and pretty soon we’d arranged for shifts of lookouts with Rob’s air horn. The thing’s ear-splitting.

We knew the city power might go off, so since I have a generator and so does Sarah, we gathered up all the extension cords we could find and set up lamps outside with wi-fi bulbs. Jason wrote a program for one of those little bitty computers so it would see when the city power went out and turn the lamps on. Not as good as the streetlights, but they would’ve given us the edge at night.

Not that we needed them, of course. Those crews at the electric company did yeoman’s work keeping the lights on. You should interview some of them.

They’re on the list. What happened when the zombies came?

They didn’t show up for three days, and everyone was on edge by then, wondering if maybe we should have run for Canada after all. “Good news is no news” for the mainstream media.

Her lip curls and her voice drips contempt as she says “mainstream media”. I hope the formidable old lady doesn’t lump me in with them.

All they reported was people getting attacked in the streets, in their cars, in their homes, and getting turned. No news about people getting ready, no news about Mike Tester, who was just ten miles from here, no news about the drone armies that were springing up all over. You should interview them, too. So we got all our news from the Internet. The bloggers, the guys on Twitter.

Anyway, the zombies showed up after three days. It was after lunch and Jack — he’s even older than me, but he was up there on the roof, taking his turn at watch — Jack set off that air horn, and I dropped the plate I was washing, I was so startled. Broke it all over the floor, but I didn’t stop to clean it up. Just like we’d planned, I grabbed my go-bag, hustled outside, went up that ladder faster than I thought these old bones could move, and pulled it up after me. I had a rope tied to it to make that easier.

I sat up on that roof with my shotgun beside me and watched. A shotgun’s not a long distance weapon, not for zombies; I planned to use it when they were in the yard. Not that I had to. We have a lot of hunters in the neighborhood, and they were up there shooting those zombies down and shouting their kill counts to each other.

The air horn and the shooting and, heck, maybe even the shouting, brought more zombies. There were only a dozen or so at first. Pretty soon there were dozens, and then more. Jack started sounding the air horn every so often, just to keep them coming. We accounted for more than a hundred that day, and not a one got within fifty yards of our homes. I never fired my shotgun. Not then, not ever, not all during the war.

What did you do about clean-up?

Oh, man, the clean-up. If I live to be a hundred — which isn’t so far, these days — I’ll never forget that smell. See, those zombies had already got up and walked when they should’ve been dead. So we couldn’t take any chances. We couldn’t bury them or just leave them to rot, but we’d heard about the Molotov cocktails in New York, so we decided to burn them.

We weren’t going to use Molotov cocktails. The grass was all wet and green because we’d had so much rain, but throwing burning fuel all over the place didn’t sound like a good idea. So we made torches. I mean real, medieval-style torches: a stick with cloth tied around the end and sprinkled with oil. Vegetable oil. Sometimes that smell reminds me …

Anyway, me and Jack took the torches, put on our heavy hiking boots and a couple of pairs of the thickest jeans we could find, wrapped wet bandanas around our noses and mouths, and we went out to burn the zombies. We’re the oldest in the neighborhood, see.

She glances at me, grins, and adopts a dramatic pose with her hand to her forehead.

We’re old, and you’re young. You have all your lives ahead of you, and the world has left us behind. We’re no loss if we get bitten.

She drops the pose when I chuckle. I don’t believe she would do anything so dramatic.

So, we went out with a couple of hunters trailing each of us and shooting anything that didn’t look dead enough. Poke a zombie with that burning torch, and they go up like you soaked them in gasoline. We burned them all that first night. We didn’t get constant swarms like some places, so we generally had time to burn them before the next batch. A few times, we had to drop everything and run for the roofs, but otherwise, it was just a stinky, disgusting chore.

And so that’s my story. There were a lot of people just like me, all over America. I’m not special.

She’s right, of course, that defenders like her sprang up all over. But maybe this little old lady was a bit special after all.