ZWD: King of an Empty City Read Online Free PDF Page B

up ten or twelve feet and was ready to make my run to the door when she walked up to it with the ball-peen hammer in hand and smashed the doorknob off with one quick blow. The door didn’t open but the insides of the doorknob were exposed, so using an ink pen I was able to get the bolt to pull back.
    I don’t know what I expected to see in there , perhaps a stockpile of weapons, grenades, RPGs, machine guns, stuff like that, like you’d find in a videogame, but it was just a garden shed. Lawnmower, weed eater, garden hose, that sort of thing. Just to my left was an old Marine folding foxhole shovel. The kind they used in WWII on their backpacks. I remembered seeing pictures of them and a story my uncle had once told me about how in WWI guys used to use them as axes, sharpening the edges and swinging them like battle-axes. I’d taken it down off its hook and pulled it out of the case that protected the shovelhead when we heard a dog bark.
                   Dogs barking are never a good sound these days. It was the dog from yesterday. The one tied to the tree. He was in the middle of the yard and barking at something in the driveway. Had we made too much noise? Yes, we had. This short guy with overalls and a flannel shirt came drifting into the yard, a zombie. He had one arm extended and his hand was shaking. He was pointing at us as if he were saying, “What are you doing in my shed?” As he came closer the dog kept backing up to us. Through gritted teeth she commanded, “Quiet!” The dog looked at her, confused, but obeyed. He made a wide circle around the guy and ran out of the yard. We never saw him again.
    I don’t know what it was, but I’d had enough. We’d lost our house to looters. We’d been homeless, on the run, starved, chased, and hunted. Every time we’d gotten anything of value we ended up leaving it behind somewhere or losing it on the run. And it was all because of these things! I took a firmer grip on the shovel handle and started moving towards him. He stopped and looked at me with a kind of pleasant smile on his face. I swung the shovel like a baseball bat and his head rolled across the yard, hitting the house and bouncing off with a thud. His body stood there for a while, then fell over and disappeared into the ground fog.
    That was it. That was the moment! That was when I stopped running, stopped being the victim. I don’t know what changed within me, but something did. I turned and looked at her. She wasn’t moving, just studying me with narrowed eyes. I walked to the shed and looked in again. This building wasn’t filled with lawn equipment anymore; I saw a room full of weapons, an arsenal. Screwdrivers were weapons and so were hammers, spades, tree limb loppers, pruners, big shovels, saws, wrenches, chisels, pry bars and crowbars. Machetes, there were two of them, hanging on hooks. We were now equipped like we never had been before. You know the funny thing? We’d been in several sheds and had seen all this stuff before, but I’d never seen any of it as useful till now. Like I said, no longer the victim. No longer was I going to lose our things, no longer was I going to be a scared rabbit running in the night. No longer, no longer.
                     We grabbed things like duct tape, screwdrivers, and hammers. We found a domed backpack tent. We took the ice scraper/chopper, which is a garden hoe handle with an ice chopper head on the end of it; I don’t know what they’re called. I’ll call it an Ice Pike, it’s easier than writing ice scraper/chopper each time. We took files for sharpening. As we gathered it all up we realized we had too much to carry easily and we needed to be light.
    As we tried to think of what to do the fog outside got bigger, fuller. It no longer lingered at ground level; it was now just a foggy day out there, and colder. We decided the biggest thing we needed was a survival guide, woodland crap, things that would make our chances