The Third Time is the Harm
by William Young




Published at Smashwords by William Young
Copyright 2011 William Young




Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin - Day 654
Malcolm Kempf worked his way along the hillside, keeping his eyes on the band of shuffling undead trudging down the road. For months, little groups of zombies had been making their way into Chippewa Falls, slowly forming in the Northern Wisconsin State Fairgrounds into a gaggle that resembled the swaying of tall grass on a windy day. Malcolm had no way of knowing why that location drew them. At first, he surmised it had to do with the proximity to the Calvary, Hope and Forest Hill cemeteries and all of the potential new recruits in their graves. And then he had made his way around those cemeteries and realized not a single grave had been disturbed. Anyone buried in them was still below ground. Whatever had killed and resurrected the undead had no effect on the previously dead.
He sighted his compound bow at the trailing zombie and watched it over the tip of his arrow, feeling the gentle breeze and compensating for windage. An arrow through the skull would drop it to the ground and the others wouldn’t know they’d lost a member of their group. On the other hand, if he shot it with the Desert Eagle strapped to his hip, the entire group would turn on him, and every zombie within hearing range of the report would start shuffling his way.
He relaxed the tension on the bow and stowed the arrow into his belt quiver, watching the undead shuffle off around a bend in the road. He picked up the three rabbits he’d bagged earlier in the afternoon, keeping his eyes alert for any errant undead that might have found its way into the backwoods. For whatever reason, the walking dead didn’t often find their way off the beaten path.
“You’re getting pretty good at that, but you messed up and established a rhythm, Eli,” Malcolm said, turning his head over his right shoulder and smiling at his 14-year old son. “Remember to step carefully when you walk through the forest and to change your step pattern ever-so-slightly as you do so that the noise your feet make always sound like the vagaries of nature, not the patterns of a creature.”
Eli rolled his eyes and quickened his pace to match his. “I so thought you were going to put an arrow in that fat zombie chick’s head, Dad, but then you didn’t. What happened? You had the bow drawn and ready.”
Malcolm harrumphed low and shrugged. “I don’t know; just didn’t think there was a point to it.”
“I thought we wanted to kill all the zombies.”
“We do.”
“But you didn’t take the shot.”
“I know.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t.”

Their compound was a mile into the woods from the road. It was a former farm that had stopped being a farm sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, judging from the leftover equipment still inside the barn. The house had been boarded up sometime after farming had stopped, and forgotten. Until Malcolm and his group came across it while living in the woods after escaping the city earlier that first year. Nature had recaptured much of the farmland in the decades since it had been abandoned, but with some effort and creativity, Malcolm had planted an acre with a variety of crops. There was a chicken coop, two dairy cows and a half-dozen pigs, as well. They hadn’t eaten any of the farm animals, yet, although there was fresh milk and eggs.
“What’d’ja get?” Nancy asked as father and son walked into the kitchen.
Nancy was Malcolm’s fiancée. They would have been married by now had there been no zombie apocalypse. They wore their rings anyway, figuring there might never be any “authority” to marry them, having pledged themselves to each other five months ago in front of his son, longtime friends Roy and Sara Campbell and their two daughters.
“Three rabbits are out on the stoop, Nance,” Malcolm said, closing the distance and kissing her. “Undead were all over the streets today, making their way for town, so didn’t want to risk it to get more.”
“Rabbits, huh? Haven’t had those in a couple of weeks,” Nancy said, smiling and rolling her eyes.
He smiled back. “There’s only three of them, so I’m gonna guess we’re gonna have a lot of potatoes and carrots with ‘em.”

“One of these days, we’re gonna find out what the hell happened.”
Malcolm looked over at Roy. They were sitting in the barn at “the bar,” drinking home brew. Roy’s passion from before the end of times had been making beer in his basement, small batches of whatever recipe entertained his fancy. Malcolm had always thought Roy’s hobby pre-apocalypse had been too labor-intensive, but now he was glad they had spent those days the previous summer scavenging for the equipment he needed.  “Beer is food,” Roy had said to settle the argument about how to provision their farm.
“I dunno ‘bout that, Roy,” Malcolm said. “There hasn’t been a government to speak of since the last of the National Guard boys pulled out with the police and that convoy of school buses last year. And it’s not like we get people moving into the area that could tell us anything. Everyone I come across is headed south before the winter. We might be stuck in this world for a long time.”
Roy nodded. “You know, when I used to think about life with no government, I never really meant zero government. I like to think that we’d have had the kinda government that could actually take care of a zombie problem, deliver the mail, fix the streets and do your basic police and fire work,” Roy said. “But, then, I shoulda known that if government couldn’t deliver the mail or fix the streets, it was never goin’ to be worth a shit with dealing with the undead.”
“On the upside, there’s no taxes anymore.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Roy said, a wry smile accompanying a roll of his eyes.
They both sipped their beer for a while in silence, each man inside his own head. Almost like when they would go fishing and not talk for hours, just sit there in the boat casting, reeling in walleye or perch. You didn’t need to talk to each other when you both knew what to do. They had rebuilt the farm largely in silence, too. Each man had taken over a specific aspect, Roy working on the structures and Malcolm on the livestock and garden, each man working to his strengths, helping each other when necessary. Sara and Nancy had gravitated equally naturally to the cooking and family-raising aspects of life, and though life was significantly more difficult absent everything technological that humanity had done to make life easier, they were, for the most part, happy.
Except for the kids. Life without cell phones had totally demoralized Roy’s daughters, which confounded Roy since there was nobody to talk or text. Eli occasionally despaired over his inability to play on a PlayStation 3. The sudden descent from modernity had shocked the three teenagers in ways their parents hadn’t imagined, and Malcolm got the sense that the kids felt they had been robbed of some birthright. They did their chores around the farm without too much complaining, but it was obvious they expected things to return to normal at some point. None of them expected the world to remain two-hundred years in the  past for long.
It didn’t help that they weren’t without modern conveniences. The group had several solar powered battery chargers which they used to recharge the batteries to the walkie-talkies, GPS devices, mp3 players and assorted other electronic gadgets they had on the farm. Rechargeable batteries were still rechargeable and the crank-handle emergency radios they had could still - on a clear night - pull in a signal from somewhere from some lonely soul who was broadcasting on a ham set. They all knew they weren’t alone, that there was still life out there on the fringes.
“Eli wants to see if we can take a cow from that dairy farm off County Highway S,” Malcolm said.
“We already have two.”
“He wants to eat it.”
“Are they still worth eating? Last time we went by there the few that were around to look at were pretty skinny.”
“He wants a hamburger,” Malcolm shrugged. “I’d like a steak, come to think of it. Rabbit, deer and turkey are getting kind of old.”
“Ayup,” Roy said. “Lots of dead ones around.”
Malcolm nodded.
“I don’t know that we should be risking our young on hamburger. Not with so many of the undead so close to that place.”
“I ain’t arguing in favor of it, I’m just sayin’ maybe it’s worth considering,” Malcolm said. “We could scout it and make a decision then.”
“The last two times we tried something like that we nearly got eaten alive by the dead walkers,” Roy said. “I think we should just stay put, stay out of the way, and learn to like living in the 1800s.”
“We ain’t going to live long that way,” Malcolm said, thinking about the prospects. “And our teeth will fall out.”

The sun outside had set, and the small propane lamp sitting on the floor between them cast a circle of light around their legs, exaggerated shadows and made them realize the direness of their current situation. Each man finished his beer and went to bed. The night watch was manned first by Eli, then by Roy’s daughters until the wives woke to prepare breakfast. Even this far off a road, one had to be ready for zombies. They had no rhyme, no reason, no predictability, a lesson Malcolm had learned in the early days of the apocalypse when foraging for the necessities of a life he hadn’t ever - really - anticipated living, and he had anticipated a lot of end-of-the-world scenarios.
But all of them had been based around the actions of people and what people would do in the event of a once-in-a-thousand-year natural disaster or sudden nuclear attack. It had never occurred to him to prepare for Night of the Living Dead. And, anyway, he had never watched zombie movies, so he had no idea.

Malcolm, Roy and Eli were on their knees in the scrub brush watching five undead mill aimlessly around the barn that housed their four-wheelers. They kept the vehicles a mile away from where they lived so that the sounds of the engines wouldn’t draw the walkers to their actual home, but it had been almost a week since they had last used them, and there was a squad of zombies standing around the structure.
“The cost of these steaks just got a bit more expensive,” Roy said.
Malcolm turned to him and nodded.
Eli looked at them with incredulity. “We can take them out easy from this distance, Dad. They’ll never know what hit them.”
Malcolm looked at his son and gave him the “patience, son” face. His son was always too eager to take a shot, to claim the victory, to walk home with the game. 
“That doesn’t make a whole lotta sense,” Roy said, watching through binoculars.  “They can’t know what’s in the shack, since they weren’t anywhere around here when we locked ‘em up last week. But, there they are, almost as if they were told to guard it.”
“You know, from all we’ve seen them doing the last year or so, it’s starting to make me wonder if maybe they’re not completely dead inside, like there might be some small bit of the person left inside,” Malcolm said, watching the undead mill about and scanning the horizon for some sign of something intentional. “Maybe they’re aware of the world? Maybe they remember things? Maybe they have some intelligence?”
Roy looked at him and shrugged. “Let’s hope not. On the plus side, they’re slow. But on the other side, they usually come in packs.”
Malcolm nodded in thought. “I’m starting to wonder if they’re some sort of pack-hunting ... species. They can’t succeed well individually, but as a large group, they have a good chance of surviving an encounter through attrition.”
“Let’s just kill ‘em,” Eli said, pulling the arrow back-and-forth in his bow.
“Eli, relax,” Malcolm said, waving his palm toward the ground. “We need to get a sense of the situation before we do anything.”
“You two hold here,” Roy said, “I’ll flank ‘em from the right side and get a view of what’s goin’ on behind the structure and down the road towards town. If they’ve started figuring out how we’re operating, we’re going to need to start adapting. Just plain killing them might not always be the best first option if we want to figure out how it is they operate.”
With that, Roy melted into the underbrush and made his way off, following a dry creek bed and disappearing into the earth tones of the landscape. Malcolm watched his friend and then turned to his son. Eli resembled him, was almost a duplicate, and yet had the personality traits of his ex-wife: stubborn, impetuous, too quick to make a decision that would turn into a mistake. He had spent years in the woods with Eli, trying to teach him the patience necessary before taking a shot, the importance of doing nothing but observing for long periods of time. But Malcolm suspected the electronics lifestyle Eli had gravitated to more readily influenced his actions: his son wanted a button to mash, a joystick to move and instant gratification or a re-spawn point for another try.
But out here on the cold, windswept countryside, there were no re-spawn points. And less instant gratification.
After a while, the walkie talkie clipped to Malcolm’s belt clicked twice, a double-hiccup indicating Roy was about to initiate transmission. Malcolm held it up to his ear and adjusted the volume downward.
“Whatchya got?” Malcolm asked, his voice low and calm.
“Just what you’re looking at, nothing else around.”
“Alright, then, I’ll start with the one on the far left and move in, you take the one on your end and do the same, and Eli will shoot the center and then cover wide in case we miss anything,” Malcolm said. “Thirty seconds and let loose.”
Malcolm turned to Eli. “Take the one in the middle, then pay attention to everything else but the zombies in front of the building, got it? We don’t want any surprises while Roy and I pick off the last ones.”
Eli nodded and readied his bow.
It was over in seconds. The two zombies not hit in the initial volley had no reaction to the sudden demise of their comrades. They just stood there and stared at the fallen ones until they were felled by arrows seconds later. Eli started to move and Malcolm grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back.
“Wait. Just to make sure, we wait.”
Eli bent down on a knee, readied an arrow in his bow, and scanned the desolate countryside. Nothing. Malcolm looked at his son and wondered what he was thinking, if he was here in this moment or if he was somewhere else, thinking of whatever it was his son thought about but didn’t talk with him about.
The walkie clicked twice.
“What do you make of it?” Malcolm said into his walkie.
“Seems clear.”
“Alright,” Malcolm said, tapping his son on his shoulder, “let’s go get some hamburger.”
Twenty-minutes later they had stashed the ATVs in a dry storm water ditch and made their way on foot the half-mile to the farm. They moved slowly, in a staggered formation with about ten yards between each of them, Malcolm in the lead and Roy in trail. All had an arrow at the ready and were scanning the landscape. They made the road bordering the farm and each man and the boy took a knee, Malcolm setting his bow down and looking through his binoculars across the farm.
“Well, there are two cows still alive, but I don’t see any undead,” Malcolm said. “Two very bony cows.”
Roy took the glasses from Malcolm and scanned the farm. “Looks like. I don’t know that either of those is worth taking, their meat is probably tough as hell and gamy.”
“We could take them back to the farm and nurse them back to health, and eat one of the one’s we have,” Eli said suddenly, his voice filled with optimism.
Malcolm looked at his son and shook his head. “That we can’t do. We’re too far away from home; neither one of those cows would make it, and even if they could, we’d be exposing ourselves out here for too long. There’s too many walkers on the roads to risk the time it’d take to get them back.”
“I have to agree with your dad on this one, Eli, those two cows aren’t worth it. They’re probably starving to death, and none of us know enough about how to bring them back to health,” Roy said.
Eli sighed. “Why don’t we just kill one of them and take back what we can, then? It’s got to be better than squirrel.”
Roy laughed. Malcolm smiled and rustled his son’s shoulder. “Well, yeah, probably, but they’ve been eating wild grass for a year. At least, what they can get of it, so they’re going to taste a lot more like wild animal than the beef you remember eating.”
“You know, Mal, we are here. They are cows. And if we don’t eat them, they’re just gonna die when the winter really hits, so we might be doing them a favor it we take them out and get what we can. We can turn them into jerky at the worst, but I’m sure Nancy and Sara can figure out how to cook them to make them tasty,” Roy said.
“Alright, alright, you’ve got a point, both of you,” Malcolm said. “We might as well take them both while we’re here.”

Two hours later, Roy and Malcolm were mostly finished with cleaning the two cows, each man pleased with the decision to risk the journey. This meat would get them through winter easily, even if it was probably gamy and tough. Eli stood watch near the entrance to the barn, standing in the shadows and scanning the outdoors for undead.
“How’s it looking, Eli?” Malcolm said, wiping the blade of his Dozier K-7 knife and slipping it back into its sheath.
Eli shrugged. “Haven’t seen anything since that foursome walked down the road an hour or so ago.”
That group had stopped for a while on the road and given Eli the creeps. He couldn’t tell for sure from the distance, but had seemed to him the foursome of undead were looking at him. And then they had trundled along five minutes later.
Malcolm didn’t know what to make of the way the zombies organized themselves or how they decided to move. Mostly, they congregated in population centers, accumulating new members over time until they reached some sort of density that caused them to disperse. Almost as if they knew, somehow, that the size of the group was now no longer good for hunting the living. There was no way to predict it, but downtown had seen the zombie hordes infest and abandon it several times, so Roy and Malcolm constantly monitored the activity in town for the times when it was empty. It was then they made raiding trips on the stores for supplies.
Right now, the zombies seemed to be in a building phase, collecting at the state fairgrounds for whatever reason, and one had to be careful when moving through the world because there was no shortage of groups of undead making their way to the collection point. He and Roy had come across a group of seven a month ago after a day of fishing on Tainter Lake. They were standing around the ATVs and he and Roy had had to pick them off with bowshots before returning home for the night’s fish fry. They now hid the ATVs when they weren’t on them.
“They know we’re here,” Malcolm said suddenly.
“Who does?”
“The zombies. That’s why they were guarding the shack. Somehow, they know people are using them to get around,” Malcolm said. “Those people are us.”
Roy gave him a curious look. “We killed all the zombies guarding the shack. We hid the four-wheelers in a ditch under branches so they can’t be seen. We’re good.”
“I dunno,” Malcolm said. “We need to get out of here, soon. I think they know we’re out here somewhere and they’re looking for us. I mean, they keep changing their pattern. Sometimes they’re a large group somewhere, like they’re trying to draw us in to kill them, and then they’re everywhere in little groups, roaming the landscape. I think that’s a pattern, like they’re trying to figure out how to find those of us in hiding and trap us somewhere we think is safe.”
Just then a runner zombie turned the corner of the barn and skip-hopped past Eli into the middle of the barn, its mouth foaming, its teeth sharp in an elongated mouth. It growled, not groaned. It took a few steps closer to Malcolm and Roy, who were stepping away from the cow carcasses, their eyes tracking the undead monster, both of their bows on the ground several feet away.
An instant later an arrow pierced the shoulder of the zombie and it turned quickly to face Eli. He fumbled the next arrow out of his belt quiver and it fell to the ground as he tried to string it, fear seeping quickly through him now that he knew he had missed the first shot at its head. It raced at him, spittle flying from its mouth as it closed the ten yards between it and Eli.
And then the zombie’s head exploded in a mist of blood and skull bits, the creature tumbling forward to the ground at Eli’s feet. Eli looked over at his dad and saw him wielding his Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol, the sound of the gunshot echoing through the barn.
“You okay, Eli?” Malcolm asked, stepping toward his son and looking through the open doorway.
“Yeah, it didn’t even touch me,” Eli said, his voice shaky with adrenalin.
Malcolm turned to Roy. “Let’s get what we can and get the hell out of here.”
Just then the back door to the door to the barn splintered open and a stream of undead staggered into the room, fanning out as they stumble-walked into the main area of the barn floor. Roy picked up his bow and let loose an arrow at the closest zombie, felling it. He reloaded and downed another.
“Well, Mal, the menu just changed from beef to human. Get Eli out, I’ll hold ‘em back for a few more seconds,” Roy said, lacing another arrow into his bow and letting it fly into the skull of a zombie as he stepped slowly away from the undead.
Eli had already run out of the barn and was standing in the dirt parking area readying an arrow in his own bow. Malcolm glanced at the meat from the two cows, frowned for a micro-second at the loss, grabbed his bow and ran toward his son. As he ran, he saw a shot from his son miss a zombie, the arrow flying through the air into the distance. His son was flustered, frightened, and was quickly becoming  combat ineffective. Malcolm raised his pistol and put a round into the skull of a zombie.
“Run, Eli, run! Get to the vehicles!” Malcolm shouted at his fear-paralyzed son. “Start moving!”
Malcolm exited the barn and stopped, bow in one hand, pistol in the other, and surveyed the landscape. Several dozen walkers were moving on either side of the barn, enveloping it. Something inside Malcolm told him it had been a trap. He looked into the barn and saw Roy backing out steadily, having dropped his bow and changed over to his sidearm, putting rounds into zombie heads.  The slow walkers were about to close off the barn door when Malcolm caught a smear of fast-runners tearing through his peripheral vision toward his son.
“Roy, run!” he shouted, wondering what was making his friend down zombies instead of flee.
He glanced at his son: Eli stood motionless, his eyes wide with fear, watching two fast-movers close on him in their ghoulish skip-hop stride, his bow held at his side. Malcolm looked back into the barn, at Roy ejecting a clip from his pistol as a runner zombie raced from the back of the barn. He checked Eli, who was shaking trying to lace an arrow into his bow and then Malcolm flicked his eyes back into the barn and saw the runner almost on a backpedaling Roy, his friend pulling the slide of his pistol. He had to make a decision which zombie to shoot
Malcolm raised his pistol and fired two quick rounds,  bringing each runner down just a yard shy of his son. Eli looked at him.
“Run. Get to the ATV, go home. Run!”
Malcolm turned and looked into the barn and saw only zombies.
“Roy!” he shouted. “Roy!”
There was no shortage of zombies with their attention set on him. He had only three rounds in the pistol and another clip of seven on his belt. Nowhere near enough to do the job, including the five arrows he still had. He looked quickly for any more runners and started backing away from the barn. He kept his pistol up and pointed at the undead, their shuffling gait an irresistible force. A dead man in his forties in a tattered blue business suit made a few steps ahead of the pack coming toward Malcolm, the undead man’s face mottled-gray, the skin taut across the chin and cheek bones. For a brief second, Malcolm thought it smiled, a malignant upturn at the corner of its lips, as if it knew what it was doing and knew that its side was winning.
Malcolm squeezed the trigger of his pistol and the zombie’s skull erupted in the back with a spray of brain matter, the body collapsing to the ground. The rest of the horde paid no attention to the newly dead undead, its group attention solely focused on Malcolm and the fresh meat he represented. They had been hunting, too.
Malcolm turned and ran after his son, catching up to him at the ditch where they had hidden their ATVs. The undead coming at them from the barn were far enough away they would never catch up, but they were still coming. Malcolm looked at his son and thanked god Eli was still alive.
“You never talk about this. I’ll tell Sara and the girls what happened,” Malcolm said, throwing the branches off the vehicles.
“Dad, I’m sorry, I don’t - “ Eli started.
“Shh,” Malcolm said, moving and embracing his son in a hug, holding him close. “It’s okay, Eli, it’s not your fault. You did exactly what you were supposed to do.
He turned and looked at the cluster of zombies swarming around the barn and wondered if he were someday going to have to kill his best friend, or if they eaten enough of him that he wouldn’t come back from the dead. He climbed onto his four-wheeler, started the engine, and nodded to the road, “Now, let’s get out of here.”


Get the entire collection of 20 stories - Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse



About the Author
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.


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