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Maligator Country

LYDIA SHERRER

Frank Oberman stood on the front porch of his two-story white farm house and contemplated the sunrise. Like any good Marine at six in the morning, he had his coffee in hand.

And, like any good survivor of the Fall, he had his firearm in the other.

The weapon was a 30-06 Springfield bolt action hunting rifle that his father had acquired after the old man had retired from the Corps in ’73. Frank had since added a state-of-the-art scope, but other than that it was in its original condition. He didn’t normally carry the rifle around with him while inside the farm’s perimeter fence—his trusty S&W Model 66 Combat Magnum revolver was a permanent fixture on his belt for emergencies. But he sometimes spotted deer grazing along the woodline that bordered the front gravel drive, and he never passed up a chance to keep the big walk-in freezer in his dog kennel well stocked. He had eighteen dogs to feed, and those beasts ate a pound and a half of raw meat a day on top of the dry kibble he fed them. It didn’t help that the kibble was close to running out.

Raw meat itself wasn’t scarce. But since the vast majority of it existed in the form of crazy, diseased, blood-thirsty monsters, it didn’t help with the whole keeping-his-dogs-fed thing. He certainly wished he could feed his dogs zombie meat, but butchering and handling the plague-ridden flesh posed too great a risk of infection to their farming community. It wasn’t worth it, not while there was still wild game to hunt and they were able to keep their livestock safe from zombies. And they had been able to—thanks to his dogs.

A low canine whine at Frank’s feet brought his mind back to his morning tasks. Joe Gallrein, the informal leader of their farming community, had called for a meeting yesterday over their extended walkie-talkie network after everyone had heard that radio announcement from D.C. Apparently the Vice President had been found alive by Wolf Squadron and was officially reforming the government of their glorious US of A.

Oorah, Wolf Squadron.

At times over the hard winter months spent listening to Devil Dog radio, he’d wished he could have been there with them, killing zombies and taking back civilization. But after twenty-one years of service as an MP and then a dog handler, he’d been out of the Corps for going on twelve years now and was pushing fifty-one. Despite his rigorous farm lifestyle and the daily runs he went on with his dogs, he doubted he could have kept up with Shewolf and her men.

Frank gave the woodline one last long, careful look as he finished his coffee, then ducked back into the house to set his rifle on its hooks by the front door. When he walked back out onto the porch, he stopped at the top of the steps and crouched to give each of the three dogs sitting there a thorough rub around the ears.

The Fall was almost a year behind them, and as all farmers knew, there was too much to do to let a little thing like a zombie apocalypse slow you down. Mother Nature waited for no man, and with spring turning into another muggy Kentucky summer, everyone had plenty of work to do to keep themselves and their farms going.

Another whine of suppressed impatience came from the group of dogs, and he shook his head ruefully. “If only humans had half as much energy as you lot. Y’all are just itching to go, aren’t you?” This time a chorus of whines answered him, and he chuckled. “All right, all right. I’ll get a move on.”

Aware of all the chores he had to get done before he left for the community meeting, Frank reached down to the black device on his belt and clicked a button on it three times. The clicks sent electrical pulses to the collars of his night patrol pack whose job it was to watch over the farm while the humans slept. Contrary to popular belief, electric collars were by far the most humane form of dog training and control, not to mention that they worked over long distances and when his dogs were out of line-of-sight. It was a happy irony that they were also perfect for operating in a zombie-infested countryside where shouting and dog whistles attracted the wrong kind of attention. His dogs’ collars had an 800-yard range, which covered the one hundred acres of his farm’s perimeter fence that the dogs patrolled checking for intruders, predators, and zombies.

Within minutes of his summons, the night pack appeared around the corner of the goat barn. They each jumped the gate to the goat pasture with a powerful bound, then headed across the barnyard toward the house. All Frank’s fences were strung with electric wire, so his dogs knew to avoid it.

At a virtual explosion of whines from his feet, Frank blew out an amused huff of air, then gave the command his dogs had been waiting for. “Athos, Porthos, Aramis. Home patrol!”

The two Belgian Malinois—a breed affectionately known as Maligators because of their fierceness and willingness to bite—and the slightly more laid back German Shepherd that made up the day patrol responded immediately to his command. They bounded off the porch, Athos slightly in the lead, and went to greet their counterparts. There was a general sniffing, wagging of tails, and a few playful nips between the groups as they passed each other, and then the “three musketeers” were off to do their preliminary territory check. He’d hardly even needed to train them to check the kennel, chicken coop, goat barn, whelping barn, and the other various outbuildings before they headed out to run the perimeter. This farm was their territory, and they took care of everything in it—man or beast—with boundless energy and ferocious loyalty.

Frank shifted his attention to his night pack as they trotted up the porch steps, considerably less energetic than the day pack. Even so, their eyes were bright and attentive as they gathered around for their morning reward of pettings and gratuitous praise in Frank’s low gravelly voice. The night pack consisted of Aragorn and Legolas, two German Shepherds, and Gimli, another Belgian Malinois. Frank had made the “mistake” years ago of giving his now fifteen-year-old daughter, Maggie, the sole honor of naming all the dogs they trained, and she was a particular fan of the classics. Of course, whether or not Lord of the Rings should be considered a true classic was a frequent point of contention between Maggie and her bibliophile mother.

At least, it had been. Before the Fall.

“Get on now, you lot,” Frank told his dogs as he stood with a grunt. His three dogs pushed past him and nosed their way through the unlatched door, making a bee-line for the kitchen. Frank heard Maggie greet them with warm affection and many sappy nicknames. All the dogs adored Maggie. Of course, the fact that she prepared their twice-daily meals didn’t hurt at all. Frank fed the younger dogs still in training to establish himself as their pack alpha and the source of all things good in their doggie universe. But his day and night packs were old hands and they understood the pack hierarchy without needing that daily reminder. In any case, Maggie was essentially their secondary alpha. She was family, and while they obeyed Frank out of unflagging loyalty and devotion, they obeyed Maggie out of pure puppy love.

Nobody cared about animals the way Maggie did. And animals knew it. Somehow they could sense it, and they responded to her in ways that made Frank shake his head and swear under his breath. He used to swear out loud, but his wife, Sandra, had put a swift end to that after he’d retired and come home from the service. He’d always intended to stay the full thirty years like his father had. But by 2001 Sandra had had enough. It was either come home and be a father to their daughter, or she was getting a divorce.

It had been a rude wake-up call, but a necessary one. He’d brought his family to live near his aging parents and their small Kentucky farm. After a string of ill-fitting jobs, he’d thrown up his hands and taken the leap into small business ownership, building a kennel on the farm and establishing Braveheart Canine Services. It was a logical move, considering his experience and the fact that he preferred dogs to people. In the decade since, Frank had trained over two hundred and fifty police and personal protection dogs. In fact, he’d just gotten in a new shipment of four Maligator pups from the Ukraine last summer when all hell had broken loose.

“Mags?” Frank called, sticking his head in the door. “I’m headed to the kennel. You good?”

“Go on, Dad! As soon as I’ve got these three goofballs squared away I’ll start on breakfast.”

Frank let a corner of his mouth quirk up as he headed down the porch steps. Considering the ten years his daughter had spent caring for and training dogs by his side, it wasn’t surprising she’d picked up some of his military lingo. It still made him smile when he heard it, though.

“Morning, Frank.”

Frank nodded to Mrs. Rogers as she passed him on the way to the chicken coop. The matron was about his own age, and a close neighbor. Her husband, Mike, had leased land on one of the larger farms just north of them before the zombie plague had got to him. With all their children grown and scattered about the U.S.—and quite possibly dead by now—Mrs. Rogers had left their small tenant house down the road to move in with Frank and Maggie.

Though he had a lot of respect for Mrs. Rogers and was grateful for her help, he still avoided her. The haunted look in her eyes since her husband’s death gave him nightmares. It made him remember Sandra’s eyes just before she’d turned. It made him agonize again and again over what sort of humanity might have been left in his wife’s mind, heart, and soul right before he’d shot her in the head. Sometimes he felt guilty for how much bitterness burned in his heart, or how much pleasure he took in watching his dogs systematically rip zombies to shreds.

Sometimes. But not often.

Frank pushed the memories away and lengthened his stride so that he soon arrived at the kennel. It was a simple rectangle building of poured concrete. At one end twelve dog runs, six on each side, extended out, with a doggie door for each dog to get inside the building to their own little kennel enclosure. The concrete floor slanted inward so any waste would run down the drain in the middle of the walkway between the kennels. At the other end, the building was separated into two rooms: a combined training, grooming, and vet care room, and a food preparation room which led into the walk-in freezer. A large generator kept the electricity running, though they used it only for bare necessities besides keeping the freezer cold.

Much whining and tail-wagging greeted his appearance, and Frank got to work in the food room portioning out fresh meat, bones, and organs from a deer he’d killed a few days ago. He currently housed six dogs in the kennel, all males, three Belgian Malinois and three German Shepherds. The oldest and most experienced, two German Shepherds named Achilles and Odysseus, were his personal attack dogs that he took out with him when he was on patrol for zombies or doing a scavenging run. The other four, Thor, Loki, Fred, and George, were two more pairs he was almost done training to do similar patrols with a few hand-picked farmers able to manage the high-energy and hyper-intelligent dogs. Last summer he’d also had six more males that he’d trained up and sold, but never delivered due to the zombie apocalypse. They had been rehomed at Joe Gallrein’s, the biggest farm in their community with all the livestock and critical infrastructure in need of protection.

The four female dogs he owned lived in the whelping barn. Males he always left unfixed, but females he usually fixed as soon as he could, to keep their semi-annual heats from making the males go crazy. Males were favored for police work because of their bigger size, intimidating look, and aggression, and they were the bulk of what he trained. But females versus males for personal protection was the preference of the client. He could only wonder whether it was fate, or God, or just dumb luck that he’d managed to get four high-quality Belgian Malinois bitches right before the entire world had fallen apart. By now, most quality breeding dogs across the world were either dead or running wild in feral packs. Frank had been able to breed three out of four of his females. The litters weren’t large, since he was breeding the dogs a good year younger than was standard practice. But he hadn’t felt he could wait. These dogs were the difference between life and death for their entire community, though the first time they’d saved all their lives, they’d done nothing more spectacular than simply show up.

It’d been late last June and he’d just finished loading the four newly arrived dog crates into his camper-covered pickup when he’d witnessed his first “zombification.” The Louisville International Airport wasn’t huge by any standard, but it still had plenty of work crews to handle luggage—luggage that had been touched by multiple hands of those infected with what everyone now knew had been stage one of the zombie virus. That was what had been so horrible in the beginning. The realization that people could be infected for days without knowing it. That was why it had spread so fast. Well, that and the fact that not enough people had taken it seriously until it was too late.

Him? He’d raised his eyebrows at the avid arguments between Maggie and Sandra about what, exactly, the plague was. Maggie had started using the “z” word as soon as she saw the first video on YouTube of a naked man leaping onto a policeman and violently ripping out the officer’s throat. Just because she’d grown up in the country didn’t mean she was sheltered. She’d seen enough movies and TV shows to know a zombie when she saw one. Her mother had attempted to be the voice of reason in the house, but Maggie had been adamant. Personally, Frank had experienced enough insanity in his years overseas to know you didn’t have to believe in monsters for them to be real.

And preparedness was a Marine’s middle name . . . 

At the increased whining from inside the kennel, Frank finished dividing up all the meat and started doling it out to his dogs. Though they trembled and whined in excitement, not a single one barked. It had become known before everything went dark that zombies were attracted to light and sound, but even if they hadn’t been, Frank had already been in the habit of training his dogs not to bark except in very specific circumstances when they used it to signal something.

While the dogs ate, Frank scooped poop from the runs, then hosed down the floor. Finally, he got the dogs out one by one and ran them through their morning exercises. Fortunately, they were already almost fully trained, and so the work went quickly. He needed to head out to Joe Gallrein’s place soon.

Once he was done with the dogs, he went to the whelping barn to feed the females and check on the pups. The space was actually a storage barn for everything he used to maintain his land and his flock of twenty-odd Boer goats—well, more like fifty now, since most of the does had dropped their usual pairs of kids in the early spring. But he’d converted one end of the barn into several whelping pens for the new mothers, and this morning all was well.

After that it was back to the farm house for breakfast. Mrs. Rogers would take care of the chickens and look in on the goats. The flock didn’t need more than twice daily check-ins during the summer since they had two enormous Caucasian Shepherd dogs, Fezzik and Inigo, as their constant companions. Frank hadn’t lost a single goat to predators or accident since he’d bought the dogs and trained them up himself. The gigantic breed hailed from Russia where they were prized as fierce herd dogs capable of fighting off wolf packs and bears. Fezzik and Inigo hadn’t dismembered any zombies yet, but only because the day and night packs did their job so well.

Maggie fussed at him to slow down as he shoveled cold eggs and fried venison sausage into his mouth at the breakfast table. He gave her a noncommittal grunt that made her roll her eyes and mutter, “Why do I even bother,” before returning to clean up duties. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli watched his movements from their spot on the floor with hawklike intensity, but were too well trained to beg.

The sun was well up by the time he’d fetched and saddled his mare. Some of the farmers still had working vehicles, but gas was a precious resource and reserved for running the generators and farm equipment that kept them all going. A jaunt down to Gallrein Farms hardly justified starting up his pickup. Those farmers who hadn’t had horses in the beginning had quickly acquired them through rescue raids to farms that had either been abandoned, or had their owners fall to the plague. Frank and the others had gathered the livestock left behind before the zombies trickling out of nearby Shelbyville could feast on the helpless animals. Frank had never been particularly fond of horses, but he appreciated their versatility. Plus, his dogs would get fat and lazy riding around in a truck all the time.


It was two miles cross-country from Braveheart Canine Services to Gallrein Farms, but three if you followed the road. Frank followed the road since it gave Achilles and Odysseus room to maneuver away from the thick verdant undergrowth. Nothing had been mowed or trimmed in a year, and nature was taking back her own with a vengeance. Zombies weren’t especially stealthy, but that didn’t mean you wanted to be bogged down in chest-high weeds when one attacked you. Since the monsters ignored pain and wounds, Frank had trained his dogs to go straight for the neck. They could easily leap up and tear out a zombie’s throat, or jump the zombie from behind and savage the spinal cord to break the neck. Either attack quickly incapacitated the zombie so his dogs could disengage and attack other potential targets.

As Frank’s mare ambled along under the blue June sky, flanked on either side by his dogs, the man wondered if the Fall could have been prevented if anyone had possessed the sense to use dogs to sniff out the asymptomatic infected in the early stages and get them quarantined. Dogs had incredible noses, and could smell sickness the same way they could smell bomb materials or narcotics. Before the Fall, dogs were being trained to detect early stage cancer in humans. But he supposed things had just moved too quickly. Despite Maggie’s animated retellings of gruesome YouTube videos, even Frank himself hadn’t been spurred to action until that day at the Louisville Airport when he’d seen the luggage handler rip off his clothes and leap onto his partner with an inhuman howl.

That was when Frank had finally realized that he’d spent enough time speculating.

He’d high-tailed it home, sanitized himself and the four dog crates, then went to Shelbyville wearing a medical facemask to max out every credit card he owned buying supplies. It had been early in the crisis, so stores were still open. Though the down-to-earth country types of Shelby County were certainly spooked, and the hospitals were starting to strain at the edges, no one really understood what was coming yet.

Well, Frank had made an educated guess, and it had paid off.

Long before the lights and cell phones across the country started going dark, Frank had already been hard at work preparing. His neighbors hadn’t been too keen on all the extra work he proposed, but after he’d personally bankrolled the purchase of nearly a metric ton of fencing material, they’d finally taken him seriously. After all, they’d all been following the news, same as he had, and they’d spent their whole lives planning ahead to survive the unpredictability of each season.

This was just another season. A really long, heartbreaking, cursed-to-bloody-hell season, but a season nonetheless. Even with all their planning, though, they might not have made it if it weren’t for the dogs.

Frank’s dogs knew the difference between zombies and healthy humans as easily as they knew the difference between fresh meat and broccoli. That, plus the fact that he always selected pups with a high fight drive—the desire to challenge superior foes—meant that they had adapted to their zombie apocalypse training with ridiculous eagerness. There had been some trial and error at first as he’d experimented with new types of training exercises. But dogs were smarter than most people gave them credit for, and German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois—the preferred breeds for police and protection work—were so smart it was sometimes scary.

What he hadn’t had, though, was enough dogs to patrol all their community’s dozen or so farms, each several hundred acres in size, with livestock spread out all over the place. Though Frank and several others went on regular patrols to hunt down “leaker” zombies wandering out of nearby towns, it hadn’t been enough. After losing nearly thirty percent of their animals to wandering zombies, they’d agreed to consolidate and moved all their livestock to Gallrein Farms where the second set of day and night patrol packs Frank had trained could protect them. That was when they’d renamed their collection of farms “Maligator County,” to honor the dogs that fought for them.

Since he was always peripherally aware of his dogs, Frank noticed immediately when Odysseus stiffened and put his nose to the wind, followed closely by Achilles. Pulling his mare to a stop, he sat back and waited for them to signal. Achilles trotted over to join Odysseus by the side of the road, and after a few more moments of scenting the wind, both dogs backed up into guard position in front of him and gave out quiet chuffs. Since he’d trained them not to bark except for very specific situations, this was their way of letting him know they’d found a zombie.

“How far?” he asked in a quiet voice.

Responding together, the two dogs took several steps forward, their attention fixed on a point past the treeline in a field overgrown with ironweed and wild mustard. Their posture meant not close, but not far either. If a zombie was still quite far away, they would lie down. If it was within attack distance, they would crouch in readiness.

Frank frowned and lifted a hand to shade his eyes as he scanned the field. He couldn’t leave a zombie to wander freely this close to their farms. On the other hand, they really didn’t have time for an extended hunt. Fortunately, zombies weren’t the brightest bulbs out there, and rarely needed much encouragement to run head-first toward their own deaths.

After a moment, he grunted and shrugged. “Achilles, ambush. Odysseus, bait. Go!”

The two dogs leapt into action. Odysseus went to the edge of the road and let out a sharp barrage of thunderous barks, while Achilles bounded off into the tall grass where he quickly disappeared. Frank unslung his rifle and readied it as he carefully scanned their surroundings.

Barely five seconds after Odysseus had started his racket, Frank saw a head of matted hair pop up among the ironweed about forty yards away. Fresh, bright red blood was smeared around its mouth as if the zombie had just killed some kind of wildlife and was feasting on it. The face soon disappeared, but then the weeds started to sway in their direction and Frank knew they were in business.

Oorah.

“Odysseus, silent, guard!”

The dog went quiet and crouched, ready.

There was no sound for a long moment except the buzz of insects in the warm summer air. Then came the keening howl. Brush thrashed along the treeline and Frank spotted where the zombie had gotten hung up on the rusted barbed wire fence that separated the road from the field. It was tempting to let his dogs have at the creature, but there was no point risking it.

“Stop whining and get your sorry naked butt over here you stinken’ piece of vulture bait,” Frank yelled. His voice sounded unnaturally loud in his own ears, probably since he wasn’t used to stringing that many words together at once. The insult had its desired effect, though. The creature howled again with renewed blood-lust and redoubled its efforts to claw over the chest-high fence. Deep gouges festooned its naked body, but it ignored them all.

Finally, the rabid thing dropped ungracefully over the fence, picked itself up, and charged through the tall grass toward them. Good. Now, just a little farther—

Completely oblivious, the zombie rushed right past Achilles’ hiding place. In a single fluid motion of canine magnificence, the dog leapt out of the grass and onto the zombie’s back. Following his training, Achilles turned his head sideways as he landed so that his crushing jaws full of alligatorlike teeth clamped perfectly down on either side of the zombie’s neck. The force of a hundred and twenty pounds of pure canine ferocity made the zombie face-plant in the grass. Before it could do so much as howl in anger, Achilles had snapped its neck, almost tearing the head from the body in the process. As soon as the body went limp, the dog released his adversary and bounded back up onto the road to rejoin them, all the while licking zombie blood from his snout.

Odysseus greeted his counterpart with a sniff and a longing whine.

“I know, I know, you old coot,” Frank said. “Believe me, sometimes I wish I got more action too. But you had ambush last time. It was Achilles’ turn.” Frank wasn’t replying to his dog for the sake of conversation. While he talked, his eyes scanned the field, waiting to see if any more zombies popped up in reaction to the noise. But nothing stirred, and his dogs resumed their relaxed patrol positions on either side of his mare, telling him loud and clear that they didn’t smell any more zombies.

Frank huffed in satisfaction and re-slung his rifle, then clucked to his horse.

Any day that started out with killing zombies was a good day.


Gallrein Farms was an oddity in Maligator County. The dairy farm had been in the Gallrein family for generations, but with the recent industrialization of farming, small dairies across the U.S. had been squeezed dry and hundreds had closed down. But instead of folding, old Joe Gallrein had gotten creative. With an eye toward the rise in tourism and the increased interest in fresh, local, organic produce, Joe had expanded his operation to include a variety of products including vegetables, fruit, and flowers, and had opened up his farm to the public. Before the plague, he’d had a steady stream of visitors attending everything from school education programs, to weekly farmers’ markets, to seasonal activities like the summer sweet corn festival and fall pumpkin pickings.

Now, all of that should have spelled Gallrein Farms’ doom when the plague hit. Tourists meant a stream of potentially infected visitors. But by providence or just crazy good luck, that June Joe Gallrein’s son, Ben, had major surgery while his wife, Barbara, gave birth to their fifth child. With all that going on, the old man had decided to close the farm to the public for a few weeks. By the end of the month, Frank had seen the writing on the wall and had convinced Joe to remain closed for the foreseeable future.

And it was a good thing he had.

It wasn’t just that Gallrein Farms had milk cows or diverse vegetable gardens. It also had a large number of buildings capable of being converted into everything from refugee housing to a medical clinic, not to mention the greenhouses they already had   for growing edibles through the winter, plus multiple generators, and a solar panel array to help keep everything running.

If Frank had been the one to start their little farm collective, Joe Gallrein had been the one to make it thrive. The old man—bless his heart, as Frank’s mother had always said before she’d passed away—was the real deal. True country folk: reliable, hard-working, and with a heart of gold. Even though he was nearing his eighties, he still got up before dawn every morning to bring in the cows for milking.

Today, though, Joe wasn’t working.

As Frank rode through Gallrein Farms’ front gate, nodding to the sentry as he passed, he spotted the old man shaking hands at the entrance to the mess hall. It was really just the concrete-floored picnic area that they’d added walls to, but it served well to feed the farm hands and almost two dozen refugees who lived and worked there. Joe Gallrein’s once portly belly no longer strained the seams of his usual blue jean overalls, but that was the only thing that had changed about him since the Fall. Currently, Joe was busy “politicking” as the old man jokingly called it. “Ain’t no group’a people as ever stuck together who didn’t need a leader,” he’d said last summer when the farmers had met together for the first time. Frank was just relieved no one had tried to make him get up there and smile and talk to people. Nope. Give him dogs over people any day.

Frank watched the old man out of the corner of his eye as he tied his mare’s lead to a nearby tree where she would have shade and a patch of grass to eat while she waited. “Achilles, Odysseus, heel,” he said, then headed for the mess hall.

“Frank! Good to see you, boy,” Joe said warmly as Frank approached. “You’re the last to arrive. A couple of us wondered if you’d make it.”

Frank nodded, amused as always at being called “boy” at his age. “Dogs scented a zombie on the way over. Took care of it.”

A grave look came over Joe’s face as he reached out to shake Frank’s hand. “The night patrol took out two at dawn this morning that tried to get into the dairy pasture.”

“You burn the bodies and wash the dogs down good?”

“As always, Frank.”

Frank nodded, gave the old man’s hand a squeeze, then headed for the door. Inside was a group of about twenty, primarily men but also some women. Most of the women in their community, both farm-wives and refugees alike, were either pregnant or nursing infants, so travel was especially dangerous and meetings weren’t their top priority.

With a polite nod to anyone who met his eye and a handshake for the farmers he passed, Frank headed to one back corner with his dogs. He preferred to keep to himself, and he used the few minutes of solitude before the meeting started to reconsider a problem that constantly worried him.

Nobody really knew exactly how dangerous zombie fluids were. From what their sole medical professional could tell them—a certified midwife from town who had helped Barbara deliver her baby last June and had then been persuaded to stay—and from what they’d picked up on the radio waves, the airborne flu portion of the manufactured disease had long since broken down. Now the only risk was the blood-borne virus getting into your system. Any little cut or scrape could let it in, in theory. It was why Frank had trained his dogs to love being hosed down, plus he’d taught them a “wash” command. Frank had given it to Achilles and Odysseus on their way over as soon as they’d neared a creek. The dogs had gleefully hopped down into the water, rolled around, and generally gotten themselves completely soaked. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was the only one they had.

The biggest problem was that nobody really knew who was immune and who wasn’t. Between all the surviving members of their farming community and the refugees from nearby towns, about half of them had gotten flu-like symptoms at some point last summer, and survived. Many others hadn’t survived, of course. Everyone had lost loved ones, whether to the plague, to zombies post-Fall, or to normal diseases they hadn’t had medicine for. But nobody really knew who might have a true immunity to the zombie virus, and who had just survived a normal bout of the flu. They’d heard over the radio that a vaccine had been created, but of course only important people got it. Even if more was created, how would they get it to little ol’ Shelbyville, Kentucky?

It was a problem, indeed. All that the farmers had felt capable of doing until now was simply surviving. Survive the zombies. Survive the winter. Survive the planting season. Survive the baby boom. But the radio broadcast yesterday had changed all of that.

“Thank y’all for coming on such short notice.” Joe Gallrein’s voice rose above the hum of voices in the mess hall and quiet descended. The old man perched atop a table at the head of the room with a grunt and nodded at some of the nearby men. “Duncan, Randy, Bob, glad you could make it. Weren’t sure your missus could spare you.”

“Spare me?” asked Frank’s friend and neighbor Duncan LeCompte. “Today is baking day, and Jane always kicks me out of the house on baking day.”

“Course she does,” piped up Henry Coffee, one of their wheat farmers who sat in the back. “Otherwise you’d eat every darn thing the moment it came outta the oven.”

Duncan looked back at Henry and gave a wide grin, showing off his tobacco-stained teeth. A chuckle rippled through those assembled, but quieted again at Joe’s throat-clearing.

“I know we’ve all got work to do, so let’s get started. Pastor, would you do the honors?” Joe asked Mr. Muller, one of the refugees. The man had often protested that he was only a Sunday school teacher. But he was as close as the community had to a pastor, and so he led a short, nondenominational service every Sunday morning in the mess hall for those who felt like attending.

Frank never did.

Everyone wearing a hat followed Joe’s lead as he took off his old sweat-stained John Deere cap and bowed his head. Frank was glad he didn’t wear a hat. He didn’t have any respect left to give to God. Not after what had happened to Sandra.

“Our Father in Heaven,” Mr. Muller began in a solemn voice. “Thank you for preserving the life of our Honorable President Rebecca Staba. We pray that you will be with Wolf Squadron and all the military units fighting to take back our country. We humbly ask that you protect us by your mighty hand, and give us wisdom as we seek to make our homes and cities safe once again. Amen.”

A chorus of amens echoed him, and then Joe got things moving. “JJ, could you give us a summary of yesterday’s broadcast, for them that might not have heard it?”

JJ, or Joe Jr., Barbara Gallrein’s second oldest, was only sixteen. But in a zombie apocalypse, you grew up fast. He was mechanically inclined, and maintained Gallrein Farms’ radio antenna they’d built with scavenged parts. JJ stood and began to recount the radio message. At his mention of President Staba, there was a general backslapping and quiet celebration among everyone gathered. The thought that their country still survived in any official form was the first bit of news that had given them real hope for the future.

When JJ was finished, Joe took the floor again. “Righty, so here’s how I see it. The military may be clearing cities as fast as they can, but they’re all the way on the east coast. It could be years before they make it here, and even if we’ve got food pretty well handled, we need medicine, bad.”

There was a murmur of assent, and faces turned as people looked at each other, worry in their eyes. Just in the past few months the community had lost two women and three babies in childbirth, not to mention those they’d lost to seasonal flu and pneumonia over the winter. As if the cursed zombies weren’t bad enough.

“That’s not even considering our shortage of parts and fuel. The solar panels and stationary bikes help, but they can’t meet all our energy needs. We need our electric fences to keep the livestock safe, plus JJ and Teddy might be darn good mechanics, but they can’t fix what they ain’t got parts for.”

They had several working tractors to pull the various tillers and harvesters. Their noise in the fields drew in nearby zombies, but sharpshooters in portable deer stands took care of that. There was no telling when something critical might break, though, and once the machinery was out of commission, things would get a lot harder on everyone.

“Now, we know we can’t do a darn thing ’bout Louisville,” Joe continued. “They had near a million people last census, and we got barely over a hundred able bodies ourselves.”

Sarah Gallrein, Barbara’s oldest, raised a hand where she was sitting at the front of the mess. “Don’t forget to do the math, Pops. They said over the radio that the survival rate is estimated at about five percent. Plus the death rate from the plague and from the initial chaos was estimated well over thirty percent. So that means there’s only about 650,000 zombies in Louisville, not a million.”

Old Joe raised his eyebrows and looked about to continue, but Sarah interrupted again.

“Oh! And don’t forget that ice storm and week-long freeze in January. With winter weather and general cannibalism, that’s bye-bye to a good twenty percent of the remainder. Realistically we’re only looking at half a million zombies.”

A few chuckles and a murmured “I allus said she was the smart one in the family” answered Sarah’s summary.

“Well, I ain’t no mathematician like my granddaughter here,” Joe replied, a hint of humor in his voice, “but from where I’m sittin’ half a mil or a mil don’t make no difference to us. We’re too few. Now, Shelbyville on the other hand . . . ” He trailed off, then gave Sarah a “go on” gesture when she didn’t immediately fill the silence.

“Oh, right, um, well I think Shelbyville had maybe fourteen thousand residents, so that leaves about seven thousand zombies.”

A grim silence followed her words as each of them contemplated the number. It really wasn’t that many people, Frank thought, considering cities like Louisville or, heck, New York. But still it was far, far too many. And after a year of defending themselves and hunting to keep everyone fed, their ammo stores were not up to such a task.

“Why the heck do we need to go pokin’ the bear in the first place, huh?” said a voice in the middle of the mess hall. Percy Long had been a seasonal tobacco worker—at least that’s what he’d told everyone when he’d showed up begging for food and shelter. He had a generally sour attitude that nobody liked, but he’d survived the quarantine period, and since then had kept out of trouble and done his share of the work, so nobody could complain. “Yeah, we get some leakers drifting out to the countryside. But they’re no more’n a nuisance. If we’re just talkin’ roads to get in supplies, there’s plenty’a backroads. Why risk our hides to do the military’s job for ’em? Just leave the zombies be, I say. They’ll die out sooner or later.”

Several upraised voices cut off Joe’s attempt to reply, some of them expressing contempt, others voicing similar concerns.

“Now calm down y’all! Didn’t you hear what Joe was saying?” said a commanding voice. Ben Gallrein still walked with a limp, but he’d more or less recovered from his surgery last summer. As the general manager of Gallrein Farms, he was known for his level-headedness and common sense. “It ain’t just an issue of roads. It could be years before any kind of relief reaches us, and we could all be dead by then. Without proper medicine, fuel, and parts, we’re dangerously close to the edge, here. Plus, there are two other factors to consider. First, who knows how many other survivors are out there just barely hanging on? The more people we can rescue, the better our chances are. And second, didn’t you hear what President Staba said? This isn’t just about surviving anymore. It’s about living. I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve about had it with zombie this and zombie that. We’ve been careful for a year, and it’s gotten us where we need to be. Now it’s time to take back our town, and use the resources in it to rebuild our community.”

Cheers greeted Ben’s rousing words, but among them a voice was raised in protest.

“But more people means more mouths to feed and more chances of gettin’ infected! Fightin’ the zombies could wipe us all out if someone brings the plague back here where it’s safe.”

More arguing erupted, and Frank shook his head. He didn’t really blame his neighbors. People were just scared. But fear never won any battles.

“Nobody’s suggesting we wade in with clubs.” Frank spoke up. His deep, gravelly voice cut through the clamor and people quieted. He didn’t often speak at meetings, and many of the refugees were intimidated by him. Well, by his dogs. “Zombies have no survival instincts. It’s why my dogs kill ’em so easy. But zombie killing is exhausting work, and the dogs can’t take on big groups. We have to use our smarts and the tools we have to figure out some way to kill lots of the bastards at a time. So, who’s got ideas?”

Silence greeted his words. There was a shuffle of a boot on concrete and someone coughed as the crowd’s eyes roamed, some of them avoiding gazes, some of them staring far away in thought.

“Burn ’em?” Duncan offered around the wad of tobacco tucked into his cheek.

“Can’t afford to,” Ben said. “Fuel is too precious. Besides, we’re trying to save our town and its resources, not burn it all down.”

“What if we dug trenches and lured ’em in?” piped up someone else. “They can’t climb worth a darn. They’ll eat each other eventually.”

Several heads nodded contemplatively.

“And who’s gonna dig those trenches?” asked Sarah. “We have chores enough as it is keeping the farms going and patrolling. They’d need to be at least ten feet deep, if not more. Plus, how would we lure thousands of zombies into ’em?”

“Radios with big speakers?” JJ suggested.

His older sibling shook her head. “It wouldn’t be loud enough. We’d have to dig the holes right in the middle of town for that and it would take days. The zombies would mob us while we worked.”

“Pit traps might work in some limited circumstances,” Gary Gaines chimed in. “But it isn’t scalable enough.” Gary was an avid hunter and a crack shot. He was also a big time stock broker—who’d have figured? They’d found him surviving out in the woods after he’d fled Shelbyville. “I know we don’t have enough bullets left to kill seven thousand zombies, but we have plenty of saplings. Bows and arrows aren’t that hard to make if all we need is crude, short-range killing machines. Teach a dozen men, set them up in strategic high places around Shelbyville with a fog horn or something like that. Rotate when they make noise, so when one is being loud, others can sneak to or from their locations. It’d be a target rich environment. Even if each man only killed ten zombies a day, that’s almost a thousand in a week. We could clear out Shelbyville in two or three months.”

“Oh, oh, oh! I volunteer to be a shooter!” JJ said, waving his hand in the air.

“Over Mom’s dead body,” Sarah said.

“Come on, I’m always stuck at home with the radio, it’s not fair!”

“Zip it, you two,” their father said before Sarah could retort. “It’s not a bad idea, Gary. We might consider it if nothing else works. But that’d be pretty dangerous for the shooters, going into town every day for months at a time. Any other suggestions?”

There was a long silence.

“What about combines?”

Everyone in the room turned to look at Mary Smith, the quiet-spoken widow of one of the former tenant farmers they’d all affectionately called “Frog” for his round appearance, bullfroglike jowls, and booming voice.

“My Frog used to run all those gigantic planters and harvesters on Mr. Hornback’s land just north. I worried every day he drove ’em that there’d be an accident and he’d get pulled into one or crushed underneath. Their tires alone are almost ten feet tall! And with those big contraptions on the front, they could take out zombies as easy as they take out corn or soybeans, couldn’t they?”

This time the silence wasn’t dubious or frightened. It was charged with energy.

Frank grinned. He’d always liked Mrs. Smith. She’d come to live in the Gallrein bunkhouse and study under Juliet, their midwife, after her husband was caught unawares by a pack of zombies in his fields late last year. She was a quiet sort, but with a mean streak a mile wide for anyone who threatened those she loved.

Joe called out to one of the seated men. “Teddy, whaddaya think? All that big machinery’s been sittin’ up in their barns since last summer. Could you get ’em started?”

Teddy Thomas, their only true mechanic, chewed his bottom lip, then shrugged. “Everythin’ but the sprayer would’a already been in storage condition by late June since it’s all seasonal equipment. And I figure a little tinkerin’ outta get the sprayer up and workin’. But if you’re thinkin’ of using the combines to mow down zombies, they don’t really work like that. Insides would get all gummed up with zombie parts and the engine would seize up.”

“What if we disconnected the innards?” someone asked.

Teddy scratched his head. “Well . . . maybe.” Then after another pause. “Yeah, I guess it might work. We could try, at any rate.”

“Mowers.” Frank’s voice surprised everyone again, and all heads turned. “Not the little ones. The big, bat-wing ones they use along the interstate. They chew up anything that gets in their way. Did Mr. Hornback have one of those? Take the guards off and any zombie that got close would get cut in half.”

“Sweeeeet.”

The sound of JJ’s awed delight made Frank grin again. A kid after his own heart.

At that point multiple voices chimed in, each bringing up more giant and potentially lethal pieces of equipment that could be weaponized. JJ even suggested they go all Ash Williams from Evil Dead and put a couple of guys in hazmat suits in the back of a pickup truck wielding chainsaws. Unsurprisingly, no one took the teenager’s proposal seriously.

By the end of the meeting, though, they had pulled bits and pieces from almost everyone’s ideas to make the bare bones of a plan that might just work. It had a lot of moving parts, and there were several months of preparations in front of them. But if it worked, even if it only did half as well as they hoped, it was a start.


They decided on August 27th for Operation Death Parade. They chose August because it was Kentucky’s driest and hottest month, and the 27th because it was the anniversary of the by now legendary Last Concert of New York. It was one of the oft-told tales on Devil Dog radio whenever talk turned to the origins of Shewolf. Personally, Frank suspected many of the details were vastly exaggerated, but that was all right. Morale was important, and if they were going to take back the world from the darkness that threatened to swallow them all, then everybody needed something—or someone—to believe in, even him.

He believed in his dogs.

The first order of business was to set up a base of operations in the Hornback’s barnyard. The Hornbacks had owned one of the largest farms in the entire state—well over three thousand acres—before the plague had gotten to them. The gigantic, graveled barnyard was where Frank had led one of his first scavenging parties after the phones went down and no one had heard from the Hornbacks in several weeks. Frank hadn’t let his dogs take out the poor, zombified family. He’d done it himself with one clean shot each. They’d buried the dead, taken what stores they could carry, and locked everything up tight. But even in death, the Hornbacks did their part to protect the community, as their farm served as a vital source of fuel, parts, and equipment that Joe Gallrein lacked.

Now, though, it was time to open up shop again.

All the big equipment—tractors, planters, combines, even a massive bulldozer—was safely stored in two huge twenty-five-foot-high, concrete-floored barns. Teddy had winterized everything that had needed it before last winter, so they were optimistic he could get it all up and running again. Now, whether or not they had all the tools and materials for their planned “modifications” was another matter entirely.

It took Frank and several refugee volunteers two days to set up the electric fence around the barnyard. The noise of Teddy’s work would be bound to draw in any stray zombie for several miles. Frank had even volunteered to shack up in the biggest barn with some of his dogs for the duration, to keep an eye on the place, while Maggie stayed with Mrs. Rogers to look after their farm.

By the beginning of July, they’d confirmed they had enough materials and working machines to enact their plan. So Teddy and his two “in training” assistants got to work in earnest.

In the meantime, as Frank had heard, Gary Gaines had been busy. The hunting fanatic was happy as a bear with a pot of honey to put all his weapons know-how to good use. With a workshop full of welders, grinders, and several kinds of saws at his disposal, he discarded his bow idea in favor of crossbows, as they were easier for beginners to master. With JJ’s help, he had a dozen crossbows and hundreds of bolts made within a few weeks. After testing their efficiency on a few zombies that strayed too close to Gallrein Farms, he pronounced the crossbows a success, though only headshots reliably stopped the zombies entirely. For the weeks it took to modify the machinery, Frank had heard all about the exploits of Gary’s recruits—which excluded JJ, much to the teenager’s disappointment—as they practiced an hour or two every day on straw dummies. They had unlimited ammo, and it wasn’t as tiring as training on bows, since each crossbow had a special lever for pulling back the string.

The machinery modifications, while successful as a whole, took all of Teddy’s ingenuity and the collective experience of the entire community to complete. Fortunately, most farmers were jacks-of-all-trades, and several of the refugees were blue-collar professionals of one sort or another.

While all the crafting, machining, and target practice was going on, Frank was busy with his scouting team. Reggie and Russell Dale were brothers, bachelors, and longtime hunting buddies of Frank’s. He’d called them last summer as soon as he’d started prepping and had offered them refuge if they brought with them all the guns and ammo they could possibly carry. They’d settled in at Gallrein Farms to train more shooters and help with guard duty. There was no one Frank would rather have at his back. The three of them went on several exploratory missions into town to scavenge supplies for the operation and survey the field of battle. They avoided engaging with the zombies, knowing that even a single creature’s hunting howls could quickly draw a mob from every nook and cranny. Frank’s dogs were invaluable for helping them avoid groups and lurkers. As long as their team moved silently and stayed out of sight, they could sneak from building to building. Meanwhile, Frank’s dogs eliminated any isolated zombies they could catch unaware, attacking like silent angels of death with alligator jaws.


Near the end of August when it hadn’t rained for weeks and daily temperatures soared to the nineties, they finally began stage one of their plan.

The first thing that had to happen was road clearance. The Hornbacks had owned a massive bulldozer that they’d used to clear pathways between fields for their industrial harvesters. Joe Gallrein himself volunteered to drive it, using it to shove aside cars and large debris from the route they had chosen. When multiple people insisted it was “too dangerous” and he was “too old,” he’d simply asked who else knew how to operate a bulldozer and then grinned cheekily into the deafening silence. Still, they all worried about him, and Teddy had gone crazy adding various protective shields and an indestructible cage of wire hog panels to surround the glass-enclosed cab.

Frank was part of the “backup rescue team” that kept in radio contact with Joe while he worked. Though he reported a sizable crowd was drawn to the sound of his engine as he made his way through town, none of them managed to scale the eleven-foot dozer—as a general rule, zombies weren’t smart or coordinated enough to climb anything that mindless scrabbling wouldn’t get them over. He left a nice trail of squashed bodies in his wake, which would begin the process of drawing more zombies into the center of town. It was tricky extracting him, as they didn’t want to waste their precious supply of diesel driving the crawler all the way back to the farm. So Joe left it on the northern outskirts of town and slipped into one pickup while another drove around and honked to distract the dwindling crowd that had followed the dozer out of Shelbyville.

The second part of stage one required more stealth. Fortunately, the moon was almost full by then, and with the clear skies they had enough illumination to drive without headlights.

Frank had never done much with pesticides before—he used his goats for weed control. So he learned all sorts of new things the night they staged two large metal water troughs at the crossroads of Highway 53 and U.S. 60, just at the eastern end of Shelbyville. It turned out that paraquat dichloride, a weed killer used by industrial farmers, was so poisonous that even a single sip could kill you; and there had been plenty of it at the Hornback’s farm. They filled up the troughs with half water, half paraquat, then set up a battery-powered lantern and old CD player nearby, turning both on right before hightailing it out of town. With any luck it would attract a good-sized mob of thirsty zombies, who would drop dead close to the water and draw in even more zombies with their freshly dead meat.


The morning of August 27th dawned bright and sunny, and as Frank stood on his front porch scanning the woodline for deer, he could honestly say he was looking forward to a good ol’ country parade. Teddy and his assistant mechanics had spent the last week living in the barns with their pet projects, so he’d been able to go back to sleeping in his own bed.

Maggie joined him on the porch once she’d fed the night pack. For some reason he just stood there, watching the morning sun turn the tops of the verdant green trees a glowing gold.

“Dad . . . ” Maggie began, but then trailed off.

Frank’s reverie was broken and he raised the hand not holding his coffee to give his daughter’s shoulder a brief squeeze. “We’ll be fine, Mags. The dogs have been rarin’ for a really good fight. They’ll have the time of their lives and we’ll be home before you know it.”

“I—I know, Dad. I am worried about you, and everyone else, of course. But . . . that’s not what I wanted to say.” She fell silent, and the silence stretched on until Frank wished he could force his feet to move, taking him off the porch to the uncomplicated solitude of the kennel.

“You know . . . you know what happened to Mom wasn’t your fault, right?”

Frank gritted his teeth as guilt and loss stabbed like daggers into his chest. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know,” Maggie replied, her voice quiet. She slipped her fingers through his, holding him fast and preventing his escape. “But it’s not your fault. And no matter how many zombies you kill, it won’t bring her back.”

“Not why I kill ’em.”

“I know that, Dad. I know we have to kill those poor, poor people. I know they have to die for us survivors to live. But at the same time . . . I don’t want you hating them while you kill them. It isn’t right.”

“Right or wrong doesn’t matter anymore, Maggie. This is the f—the freaking end of the world. If God was ever around, he’s not anymore.”

“You don’t believe that, Dad. Not really. Otherwise you wouldn’t have worked so hard to set up our community to survive this horror.”

“If I’d known I’d bring back the plague to kill your mother and almost kill you, I wouldn’t have done it. Would’ve left every damn one of them to die on their own.” Frank’s gravelly voice ached with bitterness, but even as he said the words, he knew what Maggie would say, and that she would be right.

“You don’t mean that either, Dad. Semper Fidelis, right?” She squeezed his hand, and he felt his eyes burning. “You took every precaution you could. It’s not your fault it somehow skipped you and took hold of Mom so hard. And I have you to thank that I survived it. You and your stubborn, ornery genes that would probably survive anything short of a dirty bomb.”

Despite himself, Frank’s lip twitched.

“Just . . . just promise me you’ll try, Dad? Promise me you’ll try to have a little pity in your heart, while you kill them? Maybe say a prayer or two? None of this is their fault; none of them deserve to die. Please?”

After a long moment of silence, Frank let out a breath. “I’ll try.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Maggie said, then stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “And you’d better be careful. I need someone to help me train all these goofball pups that you’ve foisted on me. I can’t have my best training assistant getting all eaten up by zombies.”

Frank snorted. Assistant? That smart-aleck teenager. He looked down at her and she grinned cheekily up at him. With a shake of his head, he extracted his hand, ruffled her hair, then took the porch steps two at a time as he hurried off to get his dogs ready for battle.


If you grew up in a big city, it was likely you’d go your whole life without witnessing a small town country parade. The kind with tractors pulling tobacco wagons full of candy-throwing 4-H’ers, pickup trucks trailing red, white, and blue streamers, homemade floats driven by riding mowers, and, of course, the ubiquitous fire trucks. Whether it was the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Veterans Day, or the local Pumpkin festival, country towns loved putting on a good parade.

The citizens of Maligator County were no exception, with one small difference: they weren’t looking to entertain their audience. They were looking to squash them into zombie paste.

Frank’s black pickup was the lead vehicle, with Duncan at the wheel and Frank, his dogs, and Reggie and Russell in the truck bed. It was as hot as hell under the August sun, but the three in the back wore firefighter coveralls, helmets, and goggles anyway, since they hadn’t been able to find any unused hazmat suits. The truck itself was outfitted with a sturdy grille guard to protect the front, and like in all the vehicles in their parade, the glass-enclosed cab was protected by welded hog panels. They’d taken the camper off the back to install a seven-foot-tall cage made of more hog panels layered with wire fencing to keep zombies from reaching in. And just in case they got stuck in a swarm, they had two heavy-duty propane torches, ready to melt the face off of any zombie who got close.

Position two would be held by Joe with his now-beloved bulldozer, once the cavalcade neared town and he could get it fired up. His job was to “soften up the crowd” as he put it, and break apart any solid packs of zombies that formed behind the lead truck. For this occasion, the bulldozer’s blade would be tilted forward to funnel zombies underneath its crushing bulk.

Third in their grand parade was a 9630 John Deere tractor driven by Randy Davis, a tobacco farmer who’d spent his life behind a tractor wheel, if never one quite so big. The twelve-foot monster he operated was one of the largest on the market and was fitted with a double row of tires nearly eight feet high and two feet wide each. Welded to a frame affixed to the tractor’s protruding hood was an honest to God biplane engine and propeller that Teddy had found who knew where. The mechanic had sharpened its blades to a razor edge and it ran at full steam, preceding the tractor like a whirlwind of death. Any zombies smart enough to avoid it would be greeted by the heavy-duty, twenty-foot wide bat-wing mower the tractor pulled behind it. Every guard had been removed and every metal cover had been cut to the bare minimum needed to maintain the mower’s structural integrity. What was left was four interlocking vortexes of three-foot blades spinning at over fifty times per second. Any zombie unfortunate enough to come into contact with it would be instantly reduced to mincemeat.

Following about twenty yards behind the tractor to avoid most of the blood and guts splatter was a 9870 STS combine outfitted with a soybean air-reel, also with its guards removed. The massive, twenty-five-foot contraption consisted of rows upon rows of spikes spinning forward and downward, meant to feed soybean stalks into the combine’s internal harvesting mechanisms. For Operation Death Parade, however, the harvesting system had been disconnected so that only the air-reel turned, ready to hook any charging zombies and throw them beneath the sixteen-ton behemoth. Unlike the shorter tractor and bulldozer, this fifteen-foot-high piece of machinery had smooth unscalable sides, though they did remove the cab access ladder, just in case. Perched high up in the driver seat was none other than Mary Smith. She had insisted on learning how to operate it, in memory of her husband. Teddy, who had a soft spot for her, hadn’t been able to say no.

As an added protection, and to up the parade’s swath of destruction, Mary’s combine also had a dozen passengers. Gary Gallrein and his posse of crossbowmen, decked out in home-made riot gear, face masks, goggles, and hard hats, crowded around the top edge of the combine. Each was secured to the roof by a harness, and each carried a glut of crossbow bolts.

Bringing up the rear in fine form was a 4830 John Deere sprayer, driven by Billy “Blue” Reardon, one of the Hornback’s few surviving tenant farmers who had experience driving industrial agriculture equipment. What the sprayer lacked in terms of protective spinning blades it made up for with an underside that began eight feet in the air, high enough to drive over Frank’s pickup truck with ease. It was so tall that they’d worried about it getting tangled up in the street lights, but Frank’s scouting had confirmed it would just barely scrape by underneath them. The sprayer was a special touch for all the zombie latecomers to their parade. Not only would it rain down poison into the open mouths of the howling masses running after it like mindless lemmings, but it would also cover every bit of meat and offal the parade left behind with deadly pesticide. Any zombie that fed off the pitiable fallen would soon be embraced by death themselves.

Finally, since no country parade was complete without them, every vehicle was hung with an American flag, most of them hand-made by the pregnant women and new mothers who weren’t able to help with the other preparations. Frank had heard about, though thankfully avoided, the dedication service Pastor Muller had held to pray over the flags and dedicate the souls they were about to release to the Lord. Personally, he figured if God had cared at all, he wouldn’t have allowed the bastard who’d engineered the virus to have been born in the first place. But he kept his opinion to himself.

At 10 AM sharp, the parade began five miles northeast of Shelbyville, exiting from the Hornback’s barnyard onto the cleared expanse of Highway 43. A team had already delivered Joe to his armored bulldozer, and he joined the parade as it turned from 43 West onto 53 South just north of town. By that time they’d already attracted a sizable crowd of naked, emaciated pursuers, drawn from the surrounding countryside by the rumble of engines.

The sight of the stumbling, groaning, empty-eyed people sent the first pang of pity through Frank that he’d felt since he’d been forced to shoot his wife. They were little more than skeletons, and their sunburned skin was covered in cuts, bruises, and sores. He tried not to look too closely, lest he recognize one of them as a long-lost neighbor. The horror—and necessity—of what they were about to do, finally settled over him.

These people deserved better. They deserved peace. And death was the only way Frank could give it to them, so give it he would.

As they neared the horse trough baited crossroads, Frank’s truck pulled ahead of the main parade. They took a detour through the local Tractor Supply on the corner so as to avoid the large crowd around the water troughs that feasted on the piles of corpses filling up the intersection. Just before they pulled back out onto the road, they paused to let out Frank’s dogs. Then they set off again down Main Street at an easy five miles an hour, headed west to the center of town.

The pickup led the main “Death Parade” by a good hundred yards. Their team’s job was to draw the zombies into Main Street from the surrounding buildings and make sure there was as big a crowd as possible for their parade to dispatch—they only had enough fuel to do this once. To that end they had affixed a salvaged police car siren to the roof, and Frank was putting three pairs of dogs to work: Achilles and Odysseus, Thor and Loki, and Fred and George. All his dogs were trained to operate independently once they’d gotten the “seek and destroy” command, and working in pairs meant they could protect each other from surprise attacks, while Frank, Reggie, and Russell provided overwatch protection from the truck bed.

The police siren did its job well—perhaps too well. Zombies flocked to Main Street like children to the Pied Piper’s flute, gathering much more swiftly and in greater numbers than Joe had reported on his initial clearing run. Duncan had to occasionally stomp on the gas and ram through the crowds that tried to form around them. The dog teams helped with that too, orbiting the truck in a wide circle, constantly moving, dodging, and snarling as they took down zombies and provided a distraction that kept the monsters from clustering on just one target.

Their combined efforts left a nice scattering of corpses in the street, which attracted even more zombies and redirected many who fell to feeding. Those, in turn, were attacked by their opportunistic companions, leading to a Main Street so crowded by fighting and feasting zombies that Frank worried their parade had taken on more than it could chew. He barely had time to consider it, however, because he was too busy sniping zombies off his dogs. Reggie and Russell had abandoned their guns and were busy using the blow torches to keep their truck from being completely swarmed.

By the time they were in the middle of historic downtown Shelbyville with the city square on their left and the towering court house on their right, Frank could tell they were in deep trouble. All he could see around them was a solid mass of zombies even as more flooded in from every side street. It seemed like the entire city population had migrated inward over the past week, drawn by the fresh meat and water, and had been hiding just out of sight from the hot August sun until their parade arrived. Duncan tried to rev the engine and push clear of the crowd, but the mass of bodies simply absorbed their forward momentum. Soon their tires were spinning uselessly in a quagmire of zombie blood and guts.

Frank stopped shooting and grabbed for his walkie-talkie. “Joe? Joe, come in, we need some clearance help, we’re being overrun here.” Even though he knew he was shouting, he could barely hear his own voice over the siren, and no matter how hard he pressed the walkie-talkie to his ear, he could detect no reply. He didn’t dare remove his ear protection.

As he tried a few more times to raise Joe, zombies began clawing over each other, gaining the truck hood, then the roof. With a string of curses nobody could hear, Frank dropped his hunting rifle and walkie-talkie and snatched up his Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun. He poured shot after shot into the mob, reloading with practiced ease from the bandolier slung across his chest. His fire shredded faces and chests pressed against the hog panels of their cage, but for every zombie that fell away, another clawed into its place. Duncan belatedly turned off their siren, but it was too little, too late, and he could do nothing to help but hunker down inside the cab and pray.

Frank couldn’t see his dogs or hear the shouts of his men through the raging howl of zombies. All three of them stood back to back, desperately burning or blasting away the bodies that were literally burying their truck. Zombie blood splattered them like paint and dripped down onto their helmets from above. Only the layered fencing kept the zombies from reaching through to yank them against the bars and bite or tear them to pieces. Even though the hog panels had been welded and tied down as tight as Fort Knox, the insane, single-minded fury of so many zombies was rocking the entire truck on its wheels and Frank had no idea how long the cage would last.

Seconds crawled by like hours as building panic assaulted Frank’s single-minded focus. He held on, until his fingers felt for his next shell and found only the empty loops of his bandolier. He dropped to a crouch and looked for his rifle, but could barely see through his blood-splattered safety goggles. Everything around him was covered in gore. Where was his rifle?

Something hit the truck hard from behind, and Reggie and Russell tumbled down on top of him, sending them all sprawling into the muck at their feet. Frank was suddenly aware of the deep growl of a massive engine close by, a sound he felt through the vibrating truck bed more than heard with his ears.

All three men remained prone as their truck was shoved forward, bumping and sliding over zombie bodies as more of the things tumbled from the truck roof and were jostled from the sides of the cage.

By the time the truck had reached clear pavement, enough of the zombies had disappeared that Frank could see up into the cab of Joe’s bulldozer that had just excavated them out of an inescapable scrum of ravenous monsters. The old man gave him a jaunty salute and a wink, then picked up his walkie-talkie.

“Quit goofing around there, you young whippersnapper. We’ve got work to do!” the muffled squawk of Joe’s voice came from somewhere in the truck bed. Frank scrambled to his feet, swiped his messy goggles with the back of a hand, then helped Reggie and Russell up. Duncan took advantage of the brief respite to get the truck going before the zombies had a chance to mob them again, and all three of them held on as the vehicle surged forward.

Looking back, Frank could see the mass of zombies reforming around the bulldozer. But unlike Frank’s “puny” truck, the beast of a crawler was barely even fazed by the press. It trundled on, flattening every zombie in front of it. The naked bodies pressed against the sides, trying to go under or over the protective metal sheets. But all that did was get them caught in the treads and crushed or flung toward the rear of the machine.

One zombie had managed to mount the cab, possibly having climbed up from the back, or gotten lucky and flung there from the top of Frank’s truck when Joe had rammed it. But even as Frank watched, a crossbow bolt sprouted from between the zombie’s eyes and it fell, bounced off the treads, and disappeared into the mass of its fellows.

Once they’d pulled ahead of the parade, Duncan finally turned their siren back on. But instead of slowing to resume their previous pace, he changed tactics. He kept their speed at a steady twenty miles per hour and started doing laps around each block, first to the left, then to the right. Their constant movement kept them from getting bogged down, even if the zombies they attracted to Main Street were a bit more spread out than before.

As soon as they were out of danger, Frank took stock of his dogs. After a few blocks, he managed to spot Thor, Loki, and Achilles. But Odysseus was missing from his packmate’s side, and Fred and George were nowhere to be seen. Frank’s eyes burned, and for the first time in his life he hoped to God it was because he was crying. Otherwise, it meant some bodily fluid like zombie blood might have gotten under his goggles and into his eyes. He busied himself shooting zombies instead of thinking about what might happen to him and his gore-splattered men in a day or two. Everyone had known the risk, going in, and they’d done their best to prepare. It didn’t matter now that it might not be enough.

As his old platoon leader, Gunnery Sergeant Payne, used to say, “Focus on the moment you have, not the moment you might lose. You’ll live longer that way.”

As they neared the end of Main Street, Frank informed Duncan of a little change of plans over the walkie-talkie, then used his electric collar remote to call in his dogs. The fight had been much more intense than they’d anticipated, and as few bullets as they had, bullets were easier to replace than trained patrol dogs.

Where Main Street merged into its parallel twin Washington Street, Duncan executed a U-turn and stopped just long enough for the three remaining canines to hop into the pickup bed. Then he took off again, this time down Washington Street heading back the way they’d come. Frank’s other dogs were nowhere to be seen, but just in case, Frank sent a “go home” signal to their collars. He hoped against hope they had simply fallen behind and would obey this new command. The kind of dogs he trained were beasts of unsurpassed courage, and if they thought their alpha needed them, they would happily fight until their last breath.

The predetermined route for Operation Death Parade had the entire convoy turning around at the merging of streets and proceeding back east up Washington Street. This would take advantage of the crowd they’d already attracted and give them more area to poison, maximizing the long-term death toll.

Once again, Duncan drove in laps, keeping their speed up while not drawing too far ahead of the parade. They only sniped zombies when they circled back to Washington Street, ensuring the feeding frenzies stayed focused where the big machinery could take care of them. Frank couldn’t see all the way down the line behind them, but Mary Smith’s combine was tall enough that Gary and his crossbowmen were clearly visible atop it.

He was just glancing back again when he saw Gary rise to shift position at the same moment the combine’s engine caught on something and stuttered, jerking the entire machine and sending Gary pitching forward off the corner of the roof. The man’s tether held for a moment, and then it parted, sending him slipping and sliding down the side of the combine to the zombie infested ground below.

Frank grabbed his walkie-talkie.

“Duncan! Shut off the siren and turn around, now! Gary just fell off the north side of the combine.”

Though his heart hammered in his chest, Frank focused with steely intensity, seeking that unnatural calm of battle once more as he assessed the situation.

Duncan, showing a surprising amount of driving skill, managed a mid-street U-turn without flipping the big truck, and raced back toward the convoy, knocking aside zombies like bowling pins as he jumped the sidewalk to get around Joe’s bulldozer and Randy’s tractor. Within seconds, the side of the combine was visible.

But Gary was nowhere to be seen.

As soon as Frank’s call had gone out over the open walkie-talkie channel, the entire convoy had slowed. Frank had to make several decisions very fast. He could only hope he made the right ones.

“Everybody, get those machines moving again, now! You need to draw the zombies away from Gary.” Thankfully, the drivers obeyed his barked command without question, and he switched his attention to Duncan. “Duncan, I don’t see Gary in the street. He probably hit the ground running and is trying to get as far away from this mob as possible. Circle the block and let’s see if we can scoop him up.”

What he didn’t say was that, while he didn’t see any Gary-shaped piles of zombies here, that didn’t mean the man wasn’t already being ripped to pieces somewhere else.

Duncan took the street corner sharply, sending them up 8th Street and away from the main mob. Frank did his best to keep his balance as he knelt by his remaining dogs.

“Achilles, Thor, Loki. Seek human and guard. Got it? Seek human and guard.” It was a combination of commands he hadn’t used together before, but his dogs were smart. They knew how to seek, they knew what a human was as opposed to a zombie, and they had been well-trained to guard people. As Duncan slowed slightly to take the next corner, Frank unlatched the cage’s door and all three of his dogs leapt down and raced off. A few zombies followed after, but the dogs ignored them, loping northwest in a zigzag pattern with their noses raised to the wind.

Frank put the walkie-talkie to his mask once again. “Duncan, I sent the dogs to seek, follow them.”

It was fortunate they had the dogs’ noses, otherwise they never would have found Gary in time. The man had indeed booked it as soon as he’d hit the ground, because in the barely sixty seconds it had taken them to turn around and make it back to where he’d fallen, he was already two blocks north. With the dogs to guide them, however, they hadn’t wasted any precious time circling the block, but followed the canine noses up ninth street toward Northside Elementary School. They found Gary stuck on the fence surrounding the playground. He’d obviously tried to scale it to put a barrier between him and the dozen zombies that had followed him, but one had caught hold of his foot before he could get over, and now his leg was bent at an unnatural angle as half a dozen zombies grabbed for him at once.

Achilles, Thor, and Loki hit the howling group like three furred battering rams. Before the zombies could react, three of them were already dead. Even as half the group turned their attention to this new source of meat, the dogs had jumped on three new targets and were in the process of dispatching them when Duncan screeched up in Frank’s truck. Russell and Reggie jumped down first and immediately started taking out the scattered zombies closing in on multiple sides, drawn by the hunting howls of their fellows. Meanwhile, Frank scrambled out and around the truck and went to town with his shotgun, a fresh bandolier of shells slung across his chest. He aimed for knees, dropping the four zombies clawing at Gary to the ground so he could blow their brains out without hitting Gary in the process. Within seconds the group around Gary was dead to a man, and Frank rushed to help his friend off the fence and into the truck.

Frank held the rear as Russell and Reggie scrambled awkwardly back up onto the tailgate. But as they reached down to help him up, a whine and bark of pain met Frank’s ears. He turned toward it, shotgun raised, to find three zombies tearing into Loki a dozen yards away even as Achilles and Thor fought with two others nearby.

Murderous rage propelled Frank forward, but his two men caught his shoulders and dragged him back to the truck, struggling and shouting. More zombies were running toward the commotion and Frank knew his dogs would soon be overwhelmed. He yelled at them to heel, but Achilles and Thor fought on, refusing to leave their packmate. Belatedly, Frank dug into his bulky pocket and found his electric collar remote. As he let Russell and Reggie pull him up onto the tailgate, he sent a strong shock to the collars, breaking his dogs’ single-minded need to attack even as he yelled himself hoarse for them to retreat.

Finally, just as Duncan stomped on the gas to get them out of there, the two dogs broke off and raced back toward their alpha. They must have been exhausted beyond belief after fighting so hard, but they still managed to catch up to the truck and leap onto the tailgate before Duncan picked up much speed. Frank and the others helped drag them back into the cage where the poor animals flopped down onto their sides and lay there panting desperately. Russell took charge of the walkie-talkie to link up with Joe and the convoy while Frank busied himself checking his dogs for injuries.

He didn’t look back at the feasting mob of zombies as they sped away.


Sarah Gallrein estimated afterwards that they’d crushed, chopped up, or otherwise incapacitated a little over three thousand zombies with their deadly parade. Several thousand more would have died soon after from primary poisoning, and another thousand from feasting off those initially poisoned. The first heavy rain would wash most of the pesticide away, but for the moment it was killing every living thing that tried to feast on the mounds of dead, including packs of feral dogs and flocks of vultures.

Frank, perhaps thanks to his famously stubborn genes, survived. Reggie, too, remained healthy in quarantine. Russell, unfortunately, did not. He turned within twenty-four hours, and Reggie was the one to give him lasting peace with a single bullet, honoring his brother the only way he could. All the drivers and crossbowmen had been successfully protected from contamination by airtight glass or simple elevation. Of course, they burned all their clothes and left every bit of gore-splattered machinery in an unused field far away from human contact, just in case.

Gary, miraculously, did not turn. His home-made riot gear had protected him from any scrapes or cuts, and had remained splatter free. Unfortunately, the zombies that had caught him on the fence had dislocated his knee and torn multiple ligaments. Without access to complicated surgeries or physical therapy, he was guaranteed to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. He jokingly said he didn’t mind, since he didn’t need his leg to pull a trigger.

Frank spent the quarantine week after Operation Death Parade in a silent daze. He’d lost brothers in arms before. He’d had to shoot his own wife. But he had never lost a dog in the line of duty.

Now he’d lost four.

Achilles was taking it just as hard, refusing to leave Frank’s side and hardly eating or drinking. Not even news that the community had voted to rename Washington Street, Braveheart Boulevard could penetrate the darkness eating at him.

Once quarantine was over, Frank returned to his farm and his duties, performing each daily chore mechanically. Maggie took over training the dogs. They had stopped responding to him the way they should, and a part of him knew it was because he had withdrawn. He had pulled back from his position as alpha, as if by distancing himself from his dogs, he could distance himself from the pain. Only Achilles stuck by him.

A second week passed, and the farmers began preparations for the September harvest. No one spoke to Frank about the Death Parade, but he overheard Maggie and Mrs. Rogers talking about how Joe was working on bulldozing away the carrion and digging a mass grave, with plans for a memorial service to commemorate the thousands of dead. There was talk, too, of a monument being erected in the center of town. Frank even heard news of more survivors being found by the day, finally freed from their hiding places by the precipitous drop in the zombie population.

He tried to be happy. Tried to care. Mostly he just felt nothing.

A third week began.

Routine was the only thing that kept him going. Every morning was the same. Coffee. Rifle. Porch. It was so dry that he hadn’t seen any deer in weeks, but that morning, inexplicably, he saw movement along the treeline. It was a moment before training took over from the surprise, and he set his mug down on the railing to raise his rifle to his shoulder.

What he saw through his scope made him drop his antique firearm to the ground as if it were a worthless piece of firewood. The clatter brought Achilles’ head up from where he lay by Frank’s feet. Then the dog spotted what Frank had seen and took off like a shot.

Frank bounded down the steps after his dog and ran for all he was worth, feet pounding on the gravel drive. The pair of figures he’d seen come out of the woods did not speed up to greet him. They kept their pace steady, sticking close to a third figure that limped between them.

Achilles reached the group first and leapt about, barking like a two-month-old pup without a lick of training.

When Frank finally reached them, he fell to his knees and gripped Fred and George around their scruffy, muddy, burr-tangled necks, then leaned his head down to touch forehead to forehead with Odysseus. All three dogs held their composure for a moment, sensing their alpha’s need. But soon excitement broke through their training and they mobbed him with licks, their entire bodies wagging with the force of their joy.

Frank laughed. He actually laughed. He might have cried too, but he wasn’t really sure. He was too busy attempting to breathe through the assault of tongues and trying to make Odysseus sit still long enough for him to assess the dog’s injuries.

Eventually, he gave up and sat back on his rear, content to simply scratch as many necks and ears as he could reach. He heard the front door slam and Maggie’s shriek of joy. Then the day and night packs arrived, diving into the fray with yips of excited greeting. By the time Maggie joined them, Frank was flat on his back, covered in dogs, and couldn’t think of a single moment when he’d been happier.

Maybe God cared after all.


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Framed