Part One

The rooster in the living room crowed again. Catherine Murphy glanced at her barred bedroom door while she considered yelling at the bird to keep quiet. She had been awake long enough to make breakfast and get dressed, but she knew she’d never make good on her threats to kick the bird or his harem out. It wasn’t safe for them to be outside.

She sat on the corner of her bed and nursed her last cup of coffee while she stared at the boards covering her bedroom window. Boards were nailed to the exterior over the closed storm shutters as well, preventing any of the sun’s light from reaching her room. Though the sun’s rays spilled in through the open bathroom window, it was still too early for the dim beams of light to reach out past the bathtub.

On her nightstand and all along the headboard, a row of candles were pressed into dried puddles of melted wax. When Catherine used up her supply, she would scrape the wax from every flat surface and mix the chunks in a fondue pot with fresh beeswax to make more candles. Ever since the invasion began, nothing could be wasted.

Catherine raised her head toward the ceiling, which had become a dull grey color over the last few months. The boarded windows meant many candles had to be burnt to provide enough light to work by. But even with a dozen candles lighting a room, Catherine’s eyes often felt sore and dry by mid-morning. She could understand why so many people had suffered from blindness before the invention of electrical lights. In poor indoor light, people strained their eyes far harder than they’d taxed any other part of their body.

The thought led her to wonder if people would begin to die in their thirties again. It made sense to her. The longevity of modern people came from their decreased workloads. Even people in the country had things easier, with farm machinery removing many of the harshest manual labor tasks.

And now, with the zombies having taken away most of the motors and electricity, people would begin to die from working themselves to death. That was assuming they weren’t killed and eaten, of course.

Catherine swirled the last sip of coffee to pick up the grounds in the tiny black liquid wave. It was an old habit of her grandfather, who used to grimace through the last gritty swallow of his coffee. If he was asked why he bothered drinking the grounds, he would reply “Because I paid for them too.”

Catherine didn’t pay for her coffee so much as barter for it, but every trip to retrieve supplies was taxing. It involved a two mile hike to get to Brown’s market in Natalia, and then the return trip was even more difficult with the burden of the groceries. And again, that was before anyone factored in dodging zombies.

Grimacing as she swallowed her coffee, Catherine got up and went to the bathroom to rinse out the mug. The bathroom served a dual purpose as her kitchen. Without electricity the washer and dryer were useless, so Catherine hauled them out on a dolly before she dragged in the barbecue grill.

Because she needed the single high window to be open to vent the smoke, an assortment of weapons sat behind the free standing cast iron tub. Most zombies weren’t tall enough to look through the window, and none were smart enough to know how to climb in.

But there were usually hands groping at the sill whenever Catherine finished cooking, and the day was no exception. Catherine stepped into the tub and selected a fire poker before she leaned closer to the window to see if the two sets of hands were attached to the only zombies outside.

Instead, she found three, and the third man in the back was “lucky” enough to look up at Catherine. The green color of his irises were faded by milky corneas, and the whites of the zombie’s eyes had become a mottled grey mixed with yellow spots which moved on their own. The roving speckles were the maggots which had begun to feast on the zombie’s eyes.

Catherine knew the zombie didn’t really see her. There was no way it could. She knew it was one of the oldest zombies who had shambled out of the cities and into the country to pick off the last remains of life on the planet.

Before the television broadcasts shut off, many scientists speculated how the zombies would eventually decay to the point where they would fall apart. No matter how much they ate, none could prevent insects from laying eggs in their dead flesh, and as the population of larval invaders grew, the zombies became weaker and slower.

The zombie’s skin was pitted by craters where insects chewed their way out of the flesh. Just under the broken skin, more maggots and grubs writhed against each other, causing the zombie’s face to undulate constantly.

But the two zombies groping on the windowsill were fresher, and they appeared to have been dead only by a few weeks. Which was the main problem with the scientists’ theories about riding out the infection: even if a person avoided contact with the zombies, the mosquitoes and other insects carried the plague with them, and everyone had become a carrier. Once a person died for any reason, they joined the ranks of the undead army.

Catherine stared at the zombie with maggot filled eyes, wondering if it was following the others by scent, or if some other force kept the body moving. A sudden disturbing thought caught her off guard: Maybe the insect larvae are animating the zombies.

The morbid thought expanded while she imagined the zombie feasting upon fresh flesh. It would swallow the tissue without chewing and the larvae worked the food down to a dry stomach filled with flies and beetles which never had to leave the body. But what insect would be the “pilot” to the community of carrion feeders? Perhaps a wasp living in the ear? Maybe it was a tunneling spider of some sort, or a queen bee who had substituted brains for her usual diet of royal jelly.

Catherine let a tremor run through her body to acknowledge the disgust she felt for the pathetic creature, and then she slipped the poker out the window to drive the point through the forehead of the zombie.
Brittle bone folded inward with a crunch, and bits of purple fluid and grey flesh burst out from the wound when she drew the weapon back. But there was no blood, only a thick violet glop which oozed from the wound. The liquid had the consistency of thick pus, and it was filled with decayed flesh and insects.

Turning the poker in her hand, Catherine sank the point down through the heads of the other two zombies. She beat the end of the tool against the wall to clear some of the sludge, but she also hoped to draw any other zombies to the window before she ventured outside.

None came while she washed the poker in the tub and set it back among her other weapons. Catherine closed the shutters and bolted them before she closed the window and locked it as well. She left the bathroom and slipped on her heavy leather jacket before she shrugged into her backpack. Then she took down the four thick beams of wood which kept her door bolted shut in case the zombies managed to get into the house. Her bedroom was the most secure room in the house, and the high window in the bathroom allowed for an escape onto the roof, where she had a cache of weapons protected under a tarp.

Catherine stacked the beams in pairs by the dresser before making her way into the living room to start her chores.

Leaned against the door was an old two handed scythe. The black iron blade was sharpened on both sides to a wickedly keen edge . The lower handle had broken off long before she’d been given the tool, but Catherine considered it her lucky weapon. It was a sentiment she’d developed after surviving the first two nights of the invasion.

She picked the scythe up, trying to recall who had handed it to her during the first chaotic night, when Catherine’s father had driven her to a church in Devine. Though it seemed like a long time had passed, the calendar in her room confirmed only three months had gone by.

The real invasion of the cities began three months before in December, and within a month, all of the major cities were gone. But the zombies remained behind to search for every last trace of life to devour. Every animal, no matter how small, was consumed before the zombies started to trickle out to search for new prey.

Their progress was slow and methodical, but three months after the first outbreak, scouts posted around Lytle reported a massive horde was attacking the town. The panicked citizens of Lytle fled, and the zombie hordes followed the flood of people rather than seek out the wildlife.

The men in Natalia and Devine used short wave radios to plan a defense of the women and children during the half day it took the zombies to arrive in Natalia. Opting to take on the hordes in a final blaze of glory, the men first drove their families to Devine. Then they’d taken almost all of their guns for their last great hunting trip.

Catherine’s father took her and her mother to St. Joseph’s in Devine, where many of the men were leaving the women and children to fend for themselves. The men passed out weapons to the women, most of which were just farm tools with sharpened edges.

Then Catherine did remember the somber old man who handed her the scythe, but she couldn’t recall his name. She met a lot of new people during the night in the church, but no one made formal introductions given the grim circumstances.

After the diminishing sounds of gunshots made the men’s fates clear, the women decided to divide the children up and split from town in different directions. Most of the older women seemed to realize the churches were impossible to defend. Instead, it was like putting out “all you can eat” signs for the zombies.

Catherine and her mother were assigned to walk with a pair of Hispanic women who had nine children between the two of them, only one of whom wasn’t related to either woman. Catherine and her mother took positions at the back of the group, while an older woman, Maggie Taylor, took point. All of the women lived within a few miles of each other outside of Natalia, and the plan was to get the kids home first before a search for the men could be made the next day.

But the plan quickly changed when the first groups of zombies shuffled out of the darkness. Then Maggie declared her house was the closest, and everyone quickly nodded their consent to alter the route.

Maggie was armed with a real saber. It had belonged to her husband, and the blade was a family heirloom passed down from father to son from before the Civil War. The saber served her well that night, and the scythe Catherine carried saved not only her life, but also the lives of seven children.
After losing the first child, both of the Hispanic women became enraged animals. One was armed with a hoe, and the other with a machete, and while the zombies tried to reach out for the children, the women felled them with frightening efficiency. In fact, their expressions of animal rage were what caused one of the boys to bolt into the waiting arms of a zombie, and he was ripped apart before anyone could help him.

Catherine allowed herself to feed off of the enraged mothers’ emotions, and it seemed Maggie did as well. But Catherine’s mother, Evelyn, could only shrink in fear. The bowie knife she carried hung at her side until she was grabbed by a zombie. Then she stabbed the stomach of the dead man, which did nothing to stop him from biting into her cheek to rip half of her face off. Catherine turned at the sound of her mother screaming to see Evelyn’s skin stretched out to an impossible length before the flesh ripped away. The interior of her mouth quickly filled with blood, and her tongue flopped toward her missing cheek as if she was trying to feel for the edges of the wound.

Catherine cut the zombie and her mother down with the same stroke of the scythe. It was her defining moment, the point when she set aside her human nature to let her animal instincts take over completely. She had only one goal from that moment on, to slay anything which came near the children.
Though they were badly outnumbered, Catherine’s group made their way six miles from Devine back to Maggie’s house on the outskirts of Natalia. In the pale dawn light, they shuffled into the living and collapsed on the floor from fatigue. But within four hours, the fight began again, and then again another two hours later.

The space between waves became smaller, but the numbers in the waves diminished. By then, the seven children were over their fears, and they too took up whatever weapons they could find to help defend the house. And finally, forty-eight hours after Catherine was driven to the church by her father, the initial invasion was over. By some sort of miracle, they lost no one else.

Catherine pushed aside the nostalgic thoughts. She picked up the scythe and opened her front door, smiling while she considered the absurdity of her life. The memories of fighting through the first zombie hordes were nostalgic because in the following weeks, Catherine became known as a hero.

In the days following the first wave of zombies, Catherine returned to make her parents’ home into a fortress strong enough to keep out the shambling hordes of the undead. The chickens were given the living room, and the goats her old bedroom. She claimed her parents’ bedroom as her own, and nearly a week of work was put into converting the master bathroom. When she finished, she had a home she truly felt safe in.

Then with her tasks completed, she began making patrols into town. During the first trips, she walked just to loot supplies from the meager stock at the grocery store and find out who else was still hanging on.

With every patrol, she managed to run into someone in need of help, and her status as a hero grew. People sought out her home to hire her as an escort for convoys, or they asked for her help in rooting out nests of zombies. Catherine never turned down any request. It was all for the good of the community, after all.

Whenever she was hired to guard someone, she made sure her charges arrived at their destinations alive and unharmed. She allowed herself to tap into her feral side to remain alert on every assignment, and in the constant fighting during the two months after the first wave was broken, she developed a style which complimented her main weapon.

Even the men seemed intimidated by her deadly grace in a fight. When Catherine danced with her scythe, the undead fell in waves.

But the intimidation of her reputation became a problem as well. People stopped talking to her because they were scared by how cold blooded she’d become.

Catherine tried to push away the line of thoughts while she patrolled around the house and barn to look for stray zombies, but with nothing else to do before she started her chores, her thoughts returned to her feelings of isolation.

The numbers of the undead roaming the countryside had dwindled until Catherine was no longer needed, and she spent more time sitting at home by herself. Then Maggie was kind enough to let Catherine in on the story which had wandered through the town grapevine.

Rosalyn, one of the two Hispanic women Catherine fought with during the first wave, began telling people she saw Catherine kill her mother. She either hadn’t seen the zombie attack Evelyn or she’d chosen to block it out of her memory. In any case, during the time Catherine spent saving the people of Natalia, they were building an urban legend about how she killed her mother in cold blood. So when they didn’t need her, they avoided her.

Then Catherine did shove aside the thought, because she didn’t like where her mind wandered once she acknowledged how much she’d begun to resent other people.

Instead, she focused on her first goal of moving the bodies into a fire pit. She laid a pile of branches over the bodies and used a Zippo lighter to start the kindling.

While the fire burned, she went to the manual pump over the well to fill buckets. She had nine five gallon buckets lined up in front of the pump, and when she finished filling every bucket, she carried them two at a time to the pair of tanks outside the house.

The black tank was a hot water heater of sorts, though in the early morning it was more often lukewarm. The smaller white tank was plastic, which made it cleaner than the rusted interior of the black tank. But during the heat of the day, both lines were almost equally hot. In effect, Catherine didn’t have hot and cold taps so much as lines for cleaning and drinking.

It was more than many folks had, and she counted her blessings for the trailers the water tanks rested upon. With the help of a neighbor and their mule, Catherine moved the tanks from a house a quarter of a mile away. The neighbor helped her to attach the tanks directly to the bathroom, so Catherine could boast how her home still had running water and a working toilet with a septic tank. On the days when she was home in the late afternoon, she had even known the joy of a hot, if somewhat dingy bath.

There wouldn’t be time for a hot bath that day, because Catherine needed to go hunting.

Walking into the barn, she took down a quiver of aluminum arrows and strapped the plastic frame to her left thigh. The next item was a wide weightlifting belt with a pair of crude leather hoops and a loose cord punched though the back. The oak shaft of the scythe slipped through the loops before she knotted the cord in a bow around the protruding grip to keep the weapon pinned to her lower back.
Next was the bowie knife which was strapped to her right thigh. She had two swords set on the tool rack above the table, but she didn’t bother taking them on her hunting trips.

Catherine took the last item from the worktable, a compound bow which had been a gift from one of the older men after she’d escorted him to the Super S market in Devine. She hadn’t considered the bow useful until she’d realized she could go hunting for the critters which were not affected by the plague, and which had still escaped becoming food for the zombies. The rabbits, moles, squirrels, and other rodents became valuable as a source of fresh meat, and Catherine quickly became proficient with the bow.

The first hour in the woods behind her home passed without incident, but at the exact moment she saw a rabbit emerge from a hole in the ground, Catherine also spotted the zombie. It was a fresh kill; a female, and a local who Catherine recognized.

Sandra Mallory had been a beautiful woman with dark brown skin in life. But in death, her flesh was a sickening ashen color. The mottled skin was still unbroken save for the flesh which had been stripped from her left side by the zombies who killed her, suggesting Sandra hadn’t yet endured her first infestation of larvae. She carried little odor of decay, and Catherine guessed she had only been dead for a few days at most.

Someone will have to go repaint the population sign again, Catherine thought while she notched an arrow and let it fly at the rabbit. The point pierced the brown eye of the gray furred rabbit, and it never had time to utter a scream before it died.

Blood drops spattered from the arrowhead as it burst out the other side of the rabbit’s skull. Even the tiny amount of fresh blood was enough to draw the zombie’s attention, and she staggered forward with a faster gait. Hands which had laid limply at the zombie’s sides raised to reach for the fresh kill. Sandra’s milky eyes widened, and her face drew into a menacing hungry snarl. The façade of humanity was shed, and the unthinking monster lurking inside the animated corpse revealed itself.

But for all the revulsion Catherine felt, she never dropped her gaze from Sandra while she notched another arrow and drew the bow line back for a quarter of a second. She released it, and Sandra flopped on her back when the arrow punched through her forehead. Sandra made a final spasm before her limbs dropped limply to the ground.

Catherine retrieved and cleaned her arrows on the leg of her jeans before she gutted the rabbit with her bowie knife. From the front pouch of her backpack, she took out a plastic sack to put the rabbit into before she settled it in the bottom of her backpack.

Leaving the pile of entrails as bait to draw more zombies toward her property, Catherine bagged a larger hare and a squirrel before she glanced up at the sun. It was still morning, but she needed to get home to prepare for her trip to the market.

In the living room, she gathered a dozen eggs from the couch cushions. Rolling the row of eggs into a towel, she folded the terry cloth bundle and laid it in a plastic bag before she settled the eggs over the slain animals. She moved to the old kitchen and into the pantry to take down her cloth shopping bags and packed them into the backpack last, ensuring the eggs were padded enough to survive a run.

Then Catherine set the backpack and scythe by the door, and she unbolted the shutters of the living room windows to clear out the leaves she used as litter for the droppings. The chickens and the rooster watched her balefully from the couch, but none made attempts to go outside. Even with bird brains, they were smart enough to know Death stalked the countryside. They would wait until she shepherded them outside in the evening.

The goats’ room was cleared in a similar manner before she went to her bedroom to change clothes. She checked her braided red hair to make sure there weren’t too many stray hairs, and she used a few drops of vegetable oil to slick down the loose ends before she rolled the braid into a tight spiral shaped bun on the back of her head.

Then she brushed her teeth and took a pot from under the sink to fill it with dried beans. Setting the pot in the sink to add clean water, she moved it to the barbecue grill and set a lid over the top to keep bugs out.

Returning to the living room, Catherine put on her backpack and tied the loose straps around her waist. She took up the belt and scythe, debating with herself about bringing the swords while she closed the belt around her waist. But she knew she would be walking to the market with Maggie, and she wouldn’t need quite as many weapons with her partner providing backup.

The trip to Maggie’s house was brisk and uneventful. Catherine alternated between walking quickly and jogging, and she covered the mile and a half in twenty-two minutes. Maggie waved a greeting as she opened the door of her house. The old woman looked almost comical with her short crown of thin curly grey hair sprouting in all directions, and the oversized leather jacket she wore made her head seem too small.

Maggie zipped up the jacket and handed Catherine a cloth bag filled to the top with fresh vegetables from her greenhouse. “What’cha got in the bag, Cat?”

“A pair of hares, a squirrel, and a dozen eggs.” Catherine smiled widely. “That with my credit will get me a cup of coffee and a fresh supply of pepper.”

Maggie shook her head then leaned it to toward her left shoulder while she slung the leather strap of her saber across her body. “I’ve got peppercorns drying on the back porch. We’re lucky the zombies don’t go after vegetation, or we’d really be screwed.”
Maggie locked her door and took her bag back before she started walking up the gravel lined driveway.
Catherine liked Maggie. The old woman was also thought of as a town crazy, although in her case, the charge was accurate. At fifty-two, Maggie was both a victim of early senility and of multiple personality disorder. The latter was brought on by the trauma she’d experienced during the first night fighting the zombies.

Catherine didn’t care about most of the gossip which amused Maggie, but she enjoyed the cheerful tone of the old woman’s voice. She was also one of the few people Catherine had been able to open up to, which was the main reason why they patrolled together.

“I killed four zombies today,” Catherine cut in on the middle of Maggie’s ramble. “That makes twelve for me this week.”

The old woman nodded her approval. “I’ve killed six. Were any of your kills fresh?”

“Yeah, Sandra Mallory showed up behind my house. I reckon we’ll find her kids soon.”

Maggie made a faint tsk sound. “They were good people. Sandra liked my tomato sauce.”

Catherine smiled. “Yeah, but I think your strawberry preserves are better.”

“Are you trying to get another jar?” Maggie asked.

“I might be, but first I have to see if anyone from Devine has shown up for a peanut butter delivery. Oh, and some bread would also help.”

“You know Cat, what you and I oughta do is make a mill and start growing some wheat. Then those pricks in Lytle couldn’t take so much for their flour shipments.” Maggie sighed before her grin returned. She rarely thought of anything troubling for long before the crazed gleam of mirth returned to her blue eyes. “They have single men in Lytle.”

Catherine rolled her eyes. “Sure they do.”

“No, really!” Maggie cackled and patted Catherine’s shoulder. “One of these days, we should doll ourselves up and go over to drag their men home with us.”

Catherine shook her head. “No thanks. We’d probably have to fight every woman on the way out of town. If I get really desperate, I might find a new use for cucumbers.”

Maggie laughed until she was red in the face and coughing.