The New Atlantis

It had once been a mediocre town aspiring to receive its first skyscraper. It had a Main Street, a High Street, and even a catchy-sounding Silver Lake Road. It had the Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry Memorial Highway running to the south and the Cemetery of St. Francis of Azzizi to the north. The main stretch through town was typical of most mediocre towns—storefronts and apartment buildings crammed tightly together, all about five or six stories high.

Now, however, most of Wakefield was underwater. At some point in the last five years, the dam at the Indian Run Reservoir had been destroyed and the basin reclaimed the territory it lost when man decided to contain it long ago. The new lake engulfed the first floor of almost every building on every side street. Main Street and some of the area to the south was all that remained above water.

The fate of the town was similar to most places Courtney had seen while driving from Georgia to Rhode Island. Whole cities were flooded, fires were raging everywhere, buildings were crumbling, and she figured at least one or two nuclear bombs had been detonated somewhere in the world. (Surely at least one nation out there had tried using them.) She imagined that at one point Rhode Island was probably a very beautiful place. If circumstances were different, she would have loved to visit one of the many lighthouses she saw from the road. The blinding walls of Eastpointe didn’t do South County any justice whatsoever. She felt kind of sorry for the rich folks who originally made their homes inside them.

She led the humvees cautiously through Wakefield.

Most of the zombies in the area were just lying around on the pavement and the sidewalks and it was hard to tell them apart from corpses that were actually dead. As the humvees went down Main Street, the functioning ones would sit up and listen intently to the approaching noises. Since they only drew oxygen when making one of their longer I’m-gonna-get-you moans and therefore didn’t draw air to speak or otherwise communicate, it was impossible to tell what exactly was going through their heads. Therefore it was hard to tell why they chose to just lay around on their backs instead of stand and stagger like a bunch of drunken idiots. There weren’t any more living people to chase after, so it made Courtney wonder if zombies felt fatigue and boredom after all.

This was where it was unavoidable and she had to start ramming them with the bull bars. The ghouls were spaced few and far apart and she knew it was best to get out of this man-made valley as quickly as possible. If she gave them time to cluster together it could mean trouble. Hopefully they would settle down again after the humvees left the area and by the time the Strike Team returned from retrieving the Cure, the zombies of Wakefield would start in prone positions once more.

Dane watched out his window and even made eye contact with one of the creatures. They stared each other down.

“Don’t panic or anything,” Leon told him. “We’re safe.”

“Oh, I’m not worried,” Dane said. “It’s not like they know how to drive a car and chase after us, right?”

And hopefully they never learn how, Courtney thought.

She was forced to swerve around a semi truck that had crashed into the front of a boutique and left its big silver trailer blocking half of Main Street. Several zombies were venturing around the other side, so she had to apply a little more pressure on the accelerator in order to ram them all at once. The hood of the humvee was high enough that she never had to worry about a zombie going up and over the windshield and leaving blood or formaldehyde all over the place. Instead they would fly backwards and off to the side as soon as they made contact with the bull bars.

The town was simply in shambles. Shopping carts and miscellaneous debris were scattered all over. Broken glass littered the sidewalks. A fire had destroyed the Sunoco and three nearby buildings. Abandoned cars were smashed into parking meters. Streetlights dangled precariously from neglected poles and traffic lights were busted. Skeletal human bodies lay discarded in the gutters.

Out of the window of an apartment building up ahead, she saw, a corpse dangled from a noose tied around its neck. It was mostly just bones and bits of sinew now. A suicide letter was still pinned on its shirt, but it was too far away to be read. She knew that if the person had been infected before committing suicide then the body would have reanimated and been stuck in the noose for the duration of its existence. It didn’t seem like it was moving now though—and if it reanimated then the decomposition would have stopped. It appeared the poor soul’s neck would snap in two at any moment and send the body tumbling to the sidewalk forty feet below.

A perfectly healthy human who had been forced to abandon all hope.

She put her eyes back down and focused on the road ahead.

She occasionally glanced in the rear-view mirror to make sure the second humvee was keeping up. Delmas seemed to be having no problems, but the zombies were flocking together behind him and staggering after the vehicles in a big mob, all with hungry outstretched arms. She again hoped that they would settle down before her team had to return through this area.

Finally, when the buildings began to thin out and become spaced further and further apart, eventually being replaced with trees and houses, she knew Wakefield was behind them.

The two humvees pressed on.

It wouldn’t be much longer before they would arrive at Point Judith.