The Undead Love Toys, Toys, Toys! Read online

unscrew, unpack before you can even get it out of the box new. No, for that I needed a toy store, for that I need Toys, Toys, Toys! Thing is, Toys, Toys, Toys! is north of the river and north of the river is sort of terrible.

  I start pedaling north on Hoagland Avenue. It’s still pretty dark out, but there is just enough morning light to see by. Hoagland is a residential street, not one of the main traffic arteries, so it’s pretty clean, not clogged up with stalled or burned out vehicles. No one tried to barricade Hoagland either, so biking on it is pretty quick. If I ignore the broken glass, bullet holes and occasional burned out house, I’m almost able to pretend that civilization still exists and that the infected and undead are only in the imagination. If only.

  It’s pretty chilly, but I’m wearing a good sweatshirt, gloves and a stocking cap. The sweatshirt has a hood on it, but I don’t use it when I’m outside the compound. Hoods block off your peripheral vision and that’s a no-no.

  Hoagland dead ends south of the train tracks, but that’s where I go cross country. You have to be careful going cross country, since no one mows anymore and tall grass can hide crawlers. Lawns aren’t mowed anymore either, but at least when I’m traveling down a street, I’ve got the sidewalk and, usually, a row of cars as buffers for anything crawling around. Here though, I need to be extra careful.

  The train tracks are at the top of an earthen berm. I’ve carved out a path up the hill and I’ve cut out sections of the chain link fence that’s on either side of the tracks, so I can ride through, no sweat. Interesting thing about this area is that it’s where the train station was way back in the 1950’s. There’s a whole underground area where they used to move the mail and the luggage from the station to the trains. Before the outbreak, homeless and junkies would live there. I’m pretty sure nothing alive is down there now. I explored it once, but didn’t find anything of worth, the whole place felt like a death trap, so I just got the heck out.

  Once past the tracks I’m on the south side of downtown. I take a short ride east on Baker Street, then head north on Ewing Street. Ewing is pretty messed up. It was a main street, so there’s lots of junked cars here. I’ve pushed most of them out of the way over the last year, so it’s not too bad, but I still take it slow and alert. I’m not so much worried about zee as I am about other humans. Stranger danger, you know how it is.

  Further on, Ewing Street runs past the old baseball stadium, which has been turned into a giant organic garden. Interesting story about how that happened. When the whole zombie outbreak came down, people naturally freaked out with the looting and killing and all that. It quickly became clear that the quicker you became part of a larger group and got organized, the better your chances of survival. No one got organized quicker and better than the Librarians. They have most of downtown locked down tight. The rumor is that they teamed up with some special forces dudes or something. I’m not sure if they’re special forces, but I am sure that they have some pretty wicked firepower and they haven’t been shy about using it when they have to. The Librarians pretty much own most of downtown, so it’s clear of cars and junk. The grass is even cut short. Better sight lines for their snipers is my guess. Anyway, it makes my trip through downtown pretty quick.

  Every group has something that they trade with the other groups. Most trade food and salvage. The Librarians trade information. Need to know the best time to plant your crop? The Librarians can sell you that information. Need to know how to make a car engine run on wood smoke? The Librarians can tell you how for a price. Want to know what local plants have medicinal properties? The Librarians can sell you that too.

  I bike up past the downtown library. The Librarians have it squared away, guard towers on the roof and the guards have working rifles, no bullet shortage for them. They didn’t board up the doors and windows, they bricked them up (nice masonry work too, just sayin’). The info business has treated them really well. Our compound has heat, electricity (sometimes) and a very productive little farm, all thanks to information we “bought” from the library. We trade with them a lot. They’re nice enough, but they don’t ever let anyone inside the library, which is too bad. Before the outbreak, I used to love going there. Oh, well. I wave to one of the snipers on the library roof, who does not wave back, turn left on Wayne Street and bike on.

  Downtown has a lot of tall building, which cleared of the undead, make great places to survive any kind of walker events. The downside is, there are not many places to grow food and water is hard to come by, so most buildings are either empty or have very small populations. This lack of people makes downtown very spooky. More spooky than the neighborhoods.

  The north side of downtown also has another set of train tracks, followed by a river. These train tracks are kind of a problems, since they are raised up and mostly walled off, so it’s hard to get over them. I made a pathway behind the bread factory (which used to smell so awesome when they were still baking bread) which gets me over the tracks. It comes out on the other side at a parking lot on Superior Street.

  The river is the biggest problem of all. It’s a mess. See, when the outbreak first happened, it was crazy. Like murder, death, mayhem crazy. Like the army shooting tanks and buildings falling down crazy. Like some genius deciding to blow up almost all of the bridges crazy. Most of the bridges were blown by combat engineers or ground attack jets.

  Downtown, Main Street has two intact bridges, one on the east side and one on the west side. There is also an east side train bridge which is passable by foot, but not by any vehicles bigger than a bike. During the chaos, some genius decided to remove a section of rails, and when the next freight train came crawling through, it came to an abrupt and complete halt.

  There is one northbound bridge left, the Old Wells Street footbridge. It’s a steel span bridge that the city fixed up for walking and biking, it wasn’t meant for cars. It’s nice, stable, and the Trolls totally own it. All of the bridges are owned by the Trolls. They’re not really trolls, they’re people, but everyone calls them the Trolls since they guard bridges. If you want to cross the river, you have to pay the Troll Toll.

  They post guards on each end of every bridge, twenty-four seven and you’re not passing through without paying the toll. Luckily, the toll isn’t too much, just a can of food, or whatever else you’ve got for trade. They’re nice trolls, they don’t fleece you too bad. They need repeat business, just like everybody else. Plus, I’m a known scrounger and they sometimes need stuff from me.

  This morning the south end of the bridge is guarded by a Troll named Jeff. His guard hut is the burned out hull of a big army tank. The turret of the tank was completely blown off and has been replaced by sand bags and a tarp, but it’s still an excellent shelter. Jeff is younger than I am, but his shotgun is big enough for both of us. He knows me and I know him so he doesn’t point that big shotgun at me or anything, which I appreciate. He says hi, I say hi. Grab a can of ravioli (the good stuff!) out of the pannier bag, tell him that I have another one for when I come back. He says why not give me both now so I don’t have to bother paying on the way back. I tell him I’m stupid, but not that stupid. He laughs and signals to the north side guard to let me through.

  The north side of town, what can I say about it? War zone? Landscape of hell done in charcoal? Death and destruction with a side order of madness and misery? Yeah, pretty much. No part of the city really escaped unharmed, but the north side got hit the worst. See, the north side of town is where the money lived. Nice new houses, businesses, shopping malls. The north side used to be great, I know because I used to live there. My house was nice. I had a pool, a giant play room, a giant bedroom, video games, tons of clothes and toys. Having a house was nice. Having a mom and dad was nice too. Oh well.

  The north side is also where most of the hospitals were. The hospitals used to be in the center and south side of town, like a hundred years ago when Mrs. Miller was young.
But the money moved north and the hospitals moved north too. Two major “Oh my god I’m bleeding out of my eyeballs!” hospital complexes and three smaller “Come here for the best rhinoplasty and breast implants,” hospitals.

  I don’t need to tell you that during the outbreak, hospitals were the last places you wanted to be. Pretty much ground zero for the newly infected, and, as you know, the newly infected, before they died and became walkers, were fast, scary and vicious as hell. Pitched battles, frightened people, riots, blocks and blocks of city burned and bombed into trash and rubble. The National Guard, police and regular people made their stand at the river, barricaded the bridges, machine gun posts, all that stuff. It sort of worked. All the cops and army guys died, most of the regular people died, but the rioters and a lot of the infected died too and the major freak-out destruction stopped at the river.

  Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, my mom and dad might not be dead. They are probably dead, but maybe not. The outbreak happened super quick and no one saw it coming. At least not anyone my parents knew saw it coming. So when they decided to take a