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San Diego, California
Mike Halloway is a thin, reedy looking man with silver hair and glasses. He's not what you'd expect a convicted felon to look like.
We were lucky. That's what it comes down to. Lucky in so many ways. In Big Sandy the prisoners were just left in their cells to rot while Zack howled outside. Everyone talks about the morality of the Beaumont decision but at least they didn't have to starve to death. We probably would have been left to a similar fate if not for Father Paul. Funny thing, I never liked the guy, thought that his sermons were a load of crap, but if he hadn't shut off the power I wouldn't be here today.
Shut off the power?
Yeah, cell doors are usually electronically locked now, or at least they were before the war. When the power went off the doors just slid open and we were all free as can be, not a guard in sight. You'd think that a few of them would have realized what a perfect fortress a prison was, but no one did, not even the warden. I guess that prisons were so firmly entrenched in people's minds as places to keep people in that it never occurred to them that they could also keep the undead out. Or maybe they were just afraid of us. I'd sure as hell rather face a group of angry felons than be eaten by zombies, but not everyone thinks that way.
What happened to Father Paul?
I don't know. Some of us have looked for him, but nothing's been found. If he'd stayed with us he'd probably be alive now. Almost all of us survived. It was touch and go at first, old feuds renewed without guards to interfere, some of the boys wanting to leave and find their families. There were a few stabbings before Lorenzo took charge.
How did he do that?
In the simplest way possible. He sent his boys straight to the armory and loaded every one of them to the gills. They came back and fired a few shots into the air and you can bet everyone stopped fighting fast. A guard stopping a fight might get stabbed because you know that lethal force is his last resort. Not so with Lorenzo. His goons would happily fire into the crowd if he told them to. Lorenzo was no one to fuck with even before Zack. He told us that anyone who wanted to leave could leave, but they'd be going over the walls, not through the gate, and they wouldn't be coming back.
Why over the walls?
Sending anyone through the gate would risk letting Zack in.
There were no infected prisoners?
Hell no. We were checked carefully, sometimes more than once a day. There's no privacy in prisons you know. We were set pretty good. First, we had a lot of talented people to work with, plumbers, electricians, even a few doctors. Then there was food, water--did you know that a lot of prisons use well water? There was enough food in the storage rooms to last us a good year if we rationed it, and you can bet Lorenzo made sure that we rationed it.
You say a year but you were besieged for three years, what did you do when the food ran out?
What anyone else above the snowline did I guess. Ransacked the closest farmhouses. We were fortunate to be above the snowline, but that first year we were kind of stupid about it. That was the only time that we lost people to Zack.
The thing about January in New York is that even though the temperature is below freezing it doesn't stay below freezing. There are warm days when the temperature climbs to the 50's which is warm enough to thaw a zombie in the sun. And the thing is, the nice sunny days are when you want to go out, or at least they were. The first sunny winter day we piled out of that prison by the dozens, stir crazy with sitting. It's different when you're self-imprisoned, easier to go mad with it. We lost fifteen men that day. Men, boys, crazy eighteen-year old kids doing time for doing dope--and we lost them, one way or another. It's the only time that I've fought zombies at close range. We didn't even have guns, just a few axes and crowbars for dozens of men.
Lorenzo wouldn't open the gates for us when we finally got back, just lowered ropes over the sides. I suppose that I can't blame him. There were a couple of hundred Zs following us Most of us made it up fine--Zs are slow after all, but there were too many of us and not enough ropes. A few guys tried going up the ropes before the guys above them were all the way up, and they all fell when the rope split. There were a few pulled down from the ropes before they got a few feet up. And then there was one kid--I'll never forget this till I die--who got onto the rope and just sat there, clinging. He couldn't climb, or he didn't believe that he could, and he just sat there as they came for him. We could hear the screaming as they stripped us to look for bites.
You said that that was the only time that you lost people to Zack, but you lost people in other ways?
There were a few suicides, especially the first year. And then there were the executions. Those mostly happened the first year too.
You helped with those?
You've obviously read the book. Yeah, I'm not proud of it, but it had to be done. There were three offences that Lorenzo would kill you for. The first was killing, and the second was rape.
The Mertens girl.
Well sure, but she's the one people remember because she was one of the refugees, because it makes us sound better. Shows what people expect of us, doesn't it, that they'd be impressed that we put a stop to rape? I guess people really don't change, even after something like the Zombie War. Mertens was only the tip of the iceberg. The refugees were a temptation to the sexual predators because they included women, but there was plenty of rape going on in the general population as well. Lorenzo's method of putting a stop to it was a hell of a lot more effective than the guards had ever been. No one turned a blind eye with Lorenzo in charge.
The third offence was stealing food. If we hadn't rationed and stuck to the rationing, then we would have all starved to death by the time we'd mastered the art of foraging. It really is an art when you're trying to feed a few thousand people. More when you count the refugees that we picked up along the way. By the second year we were good enough at it that we could focus on other things besides food. Food was the priority, but anything small enough to lug back was fair game. Clothing, medical supplies, games, sometimes valuables. We were developing a pretty nice art collection, and the library is still pretty impressive. There was one guy who started distributing stuffed animals. Then there was the booze, jewelry. We split our time between foraging and smashing zedheads. At first it was simple revenge or boredom but after a while it turned into a bit of a crusade.
That was your doing wasn't it?
I suppose, but it made sense. Every Z we smashed was one less to bother us in the summer. But more than that it gave us a sense of purpose, and we needed that. The pressure of Zack outside was making people turn against each other. It had to go somewhere. And so we started contests: who could smash the most in one day, in one month. Some of the boys got a hold of a few snowmobiles and covered more ground that way. I became very good with cross country skis. We took out Zack during the summer too. We couldn't afford to waste ammunition on them, but some of us developed very good aim with rocks. It was certainly more fun than being on gardening duty in the yard. The winners got hot showers and quality time with the DVD players and game consoles on the rare occasion that we'd fire up the generators.
So you had access to electricity, did you have access to the news?
Definitely. We knew how good we had it, and we knew when the army was coming back. A lot of guys disappeared that winter, just went out foraging and didn't come back. I guess they decided to chance it with Zack rather than waiting to be imprisoned again. I can't say that I blame them.
What happened when the soldiers came?
Lorenzo wasn't stupid. He probably had an accurate idea about what was happening to places that fought back so when they got to us we opened our doors to them. No need to give them any excuses to kill the cons. It was tense. We'd survived Zack, but compared to some we'd lived in relative luxury. And we were felons. Some of them obviously thought that we didn't deserve that luxury. We were taken into custody and split into groups. The group with Lorenzo was the first one driven away. We never saw them again.
Is that why you've taken political office, Senator Halloway?
That's part of it. The army claims that the information about what happened to those men is "Top Secret," but it's pretty obvious what actually did happen to them. If they'd been killed by Zs then there wouldn't be any reason to hide it, and if they'd stumbled onto something else then the men who'd been guarding them wouldn't have come back. Those men deserve to have the truth told. Anyone who survived the Zombie War does.