“Sure, or die.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Don’t answer that,” Oona said from above.
“What’s going on?” Laura asked.
“Don’t open the door and don’t let the kid leave. Get up here.”
There was a second and a third knock, and then it became clear these weren’t knocks in any normal sense. Someone out there was banging on the sides of the camper.
I guess they haven’t gone anywhere, Sam thought.
There was an interior ladder to the roof, which was about the best idea Sam had ever seen in terms of camper design given the current reality. These were a couple of survivalists, and they’d planned well. He appreciated that at any other time he’d have used the word paranoid to describe what he was seeing. That word was now practical, and it made him think he was exactly where he should be, regardless of his orders.
Then he got to the roof. Laura went up first, with Dobbs slow to follow. Sam got up there last and took one look at the arsenal of weaponry hanging on the reinforced low wall surrounding the rooftop, and a new word replaced practical. That word was militia. These ladies were a two-person militia, and this camper was definitely built to withstand an attack from other people with guns.
The army, in other words.
Oona was a husky woman in pajamas with kittens on them, still holding a high-powered rifle. The expression on her face made it plain that she was not happy to have him there.
“Look but don’t touch,” she said, referring to the guns. “Those ain’t for you.”
“I’m guessing the barrel end is,” he said.
She smiled. “I don’t think we gamed a single scenario where one of you ended up here with us, so you’re not wrong.”
“Any zombie scenarios?”
“Oh sure, a bunch. What did you mean about falling asleep?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Those people down there aren’t dead, they’re sleeping.”
“So more like they’re possessed.”
“If that works better for you, yes.”
“Why don’t we just wake them up?”
“I dealt with this once before. I’m pretty sure if you do that you’ll kill them.”
“Huh. Well that leaves us with a hairy problem, soldier.”
“How so?”
The camper rocked lightly.
“That’s how so. Have a look over the side.”
Because of the high walls, Sam had to walk right to the lip.
There were at least fifty people out there, and half that number was closing on the camper.
“I didn’t know there were this many people in Sorrow Falls,” he said. “Where are they coming from?”
“Farmhouses,” Laura said. “And the base up the hill.”
Sam remembered the screaming he heard in the background when he called in. At this time of night, probably half the division would have been asleep.
“It’s too soon,” he said. “Unless the zombies are moving faster when we aren’t looking.”
“Or they learned how to drive,” Dobbs offered.
“I’m not saying that’s impossible, but if they could do that they would have driven past us. The ship isn’t their destination. Something downtown is. The guys in fatigues must be from one of the outposts.”
This piqued Oona’s attention. “Come again?”
“The… outposts. We have ten or twelve of them set up in the hills. That’s where the sirens you’re hearing are all situated. It’s for the cordon scenario.”
The trailer rocked again. The people below were trying to knock it over.
“I don’t understand why they’re doing that,” Dobbs said. “Like you said, they were on their way to Main.”
“It’s a threat response,” Laura said. “They’re acting like white blood cells.”
“Because I killed one,” Oona added. “That’s why. What was the cordon scenario?”
“It’s a containment directive, in the event of a contagion, or… well, or this, I guess. It’s to keep all the weirdness contained within the town. The river’s a natural border to the east, but anyone can walk out through the woods north, south and west. The men at the outposts have orders to fan out and put a soldier at each passable point. It’s not impenetrable, but it’s better than nothing.”
Bump. The camper rocked again.
“Nice to know you all had plans to trap us in here.”
“We would have been trapped right with you. We have no jurisdiction outside the town line, so the perimeter had to be within it.”
“Well, I disagree with you there, soldier,” Oona said. She stepped up to the edge of the roof and looked down at the crowd. “A man standing at the exit is the only one not trapped in the room. Now are you telling me all these people down there are alive?”
“I don’t know if they all are. That woman there, for instance. She’d probably not.”
He pointed out a zombie in a nice dress with no nose and only one eye. The left side of her body was semi-crushed, so she was dragging herself mostly with a working right leg. She was about thirty feet away and heading for the camper, albeit slowly.
“All right, so we’ll call those original recipe zombies.”
Oona took aim with the rifle and fired once, a clean headshot that dropped the woman immediately.
“Dammit, Oona!” Laura yelled. “That’s why they’re attacking!”
“They’re already attacking, and we had to know if the same thing that drops the free-range ones also take out the original recipe.”
“I think you’re mixing your chicken metaphors.”
“Shut up, Dobbs, the one with the gun does the naming.”
“They all stopped when you fired,” Sam said. “They learned what a gunshot means.”
“How could they not know that?” Dobbs asked.
“I mean whoever is running things down there learned it.”
The trailer rocked again.
“Okay, two things,” Laura said. “First off, maybe we need to keep firing guns to get them to stop trying to push us over. Second, we could probably use an escape plan here. I don’t want to know what they’re planning to do to us in a breach, do you?”
“We can hang the outside ladder off the back and hit the field, head for the woods maybe,” Oona said. “The four of us can carry a lot of provisions and a lot of guns. I mean, as long as Dobbs’ poop zombie isn’t out there still.”
Dobbs looked over the field side. “They’re circling around now. We’d have to drop and run in the next minute to pull that off.”
“Not enough time,” Laura said. “We could start wounding them like Sam suggested. They can’t chase us with a bullet in the leg.”
“Shoot to kill and be done with it,” Oona said. “Us or them.”
“Guys,” Sam said.
“Oona, it’s not their fault!” Laura said.
“I appreciate that, but it’s still us or them, and I like us better.”
“Guys. Why don’t we just drive away? This thing still runs, doesn’t it?”
THE HEADLIGHTS DREW attention to the car, but they had little a choice. Ed didn’t know the roads well enough to navigate in the dark, and there were people to avoid besides.
It was also helpful when they discovered other cars on the road. This happened after they made it out of the tiny side streets and back onto Main, at the far northern end and away from the thickest part of the sleepwalking horde.
Annie and Ed decided, en route, to stop calling them zombies and start calling them sleepwalkers, since the latter was more accurate and less terrifying, and also self-justified the decision not to run them over without prejudice. Plus, the sleepwalker apocalypse sounded sort of cute.
It was not, alas, entirely accurate, because Annie kept spotting people she knew who happened to be dead.