Page 1

John took careful aim at the zombies milling around below him. He had a .305 Winchester with a cheap telescopic sight. It was more than enough to get headshots nine times out of ten at ranges under 50 feet. There were perhaps seventy or eighty of them milling about around the crumbling tower in the middle of the desert-like chat pile. 167 corpses littered the ground. John knew that because he had kept track over the day he had been up here by making hash marks in a notebook. Behind him were about half of five gallons of water, a weeks work of shitty MRE rations, and around a thousand rounds of .305 ammo and a few clips of .45 for his pistol.

John had been planning the trip ever his father died. He didn't understand how that had happened. The zombies struck him as so stupid and slow that humanity's defeat at their hands felt like being sucker punched by a kindergartner. So he'd taken his truck, loaded it up with the supplies his father had hoarded before he had committed suicide by slicing his wrists in the tub. It had been the zombies moaning. The house had been surrounded for days, but heavy dressers and beds blocked the doors, so all they could do was pound on the walls and scream. It had to have been the noise; John's father had been dealing with it as well as person could, until the house had been surrounded. After a week of the incessant noise, because zombies never sleep, he'd slit his wrists in an empty tub.

John took an extra careful shot at a woman zombie that was lurching near his truck in revenge for his father.

His plan wasn't really sane. What good could it do? Even if he killed all the Zombies in sunny town Joplin, he'd still be the only one left… and the silence implied by that proposition made the noise that had killed his father seem the better option. But he had wanted to do it, couldn't understand why more people hadn't done it when the zombies had first appeared. He didn't really know what had happened out in the real world while the zombies killed everyone. He had been holed up with his dad the whole time, and all he heard were shouts and the rumble of what he assumed were army trucks through the padded windows.

So he was alone. The neighborhood was deserted, even mostly empty of zombies. The one or two who had stayed behind (because they must have gone somewhere else. John certainly hadn't killed them; he was busy building up the guts to shoot his father's corpse in the head) had been easily dispatched with a sledgehammer (Shots can be heard for miles and miles son) and left lying. He didn't have the energy to bury them, or his father. So he had hummed around the house, sort of in a daze, burning up all the generator fuel watching tapes and playing Star Raider. He used the downstairs bathroom.
Then the plan came to him as he was eating soggy fried potato's that were somehow burnt at the same time. The image of him sniping zombies from his tower in the chats flashed into his mind, and he couldn't get the image out of his head.

He fired another round, but missed. The zombie had tripped over one of his previous kills just as he had fired, and he chastised himself. He should have seen that coming.

So he'd loaded up the truck with as much supplies as he thought he needed for the expedition. When all was packed, he pulled the lawnmowers and tool benches away from the garage door, pulled the release cord, and hauled the door up. He zipped out, closed the garage door and hoped that would be enough to keep the zombies outside. He didn't want one of the motherfuckers coming out of the closet while he slept or something.

He must have left a thousand zombies eating his asphalt. He laughed the whole way there, watching their pathetic attempts at chasing him. They moved like they had the worst case of arthritis ever and a heavy dose of seconal at the same time. He almost didn't notice they were rotting.

He'd come out to the chat pile, his little piece of hell. Chat piles were the remains of old strip mines that had hunted for lead in Southwestern Missouri in the last century; the tower he loaded his gear onto was most likely a part of the mine's infrastructure, although he didn't really know what possible purpose it could have served. Part of the tower was caved in, just enough to climb easily, even if you had 30 pounds of water on your back. Not so easy if you were undead. And even if one of them made it, that was what the .45 was for. When you absolutely positively have to detonate a pineal gland at close range, you need a Colt .45. His .305 was for deer hunting. More than enough power and distance for this turkey shoot, especially with a scope.

[ Continue to page 2 ]