Dead Drop

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I took a quick look behind me to make sure I was still being followed. Affirmative. In fact, there were more than I originally thought I had. I’d guess about 30 deadheads. “Deadheads” are what we call the people who are infected. They don’t seem to be alive at all. They don’t need to eat or drink. In fact, it’s been almost three months, so it doesn’t look like starving them out is going to be an option. But as I was saying, we call them deadheads because their heads and necks are completely limp. So it looks like just their heads have died. They also couldn’t run. They had a quick gait, but outdistancing them wasn’t an issue. I still had to make sure I kept their attention though. If they lose sight of you for too long, they tend to forget what they were doing. I continued over to the edge of the highway. I was on a tall raised highway. It was the uppermost highway of four that cris-crossed each other in a huge overpass, so the top one was pretty tall. I’d say somewhere between eighty and a hundred feet. That was why I brought them up here. The height was important. The event had happened. They overwhelmed authorities, everything got thrown into chaos, you know the drill. So the survivors are together. There’s plenty of food and water to go around. We’re going to make it. But we’ve got to do something about all the infected. Guns are just not efficient. With the thousands of infected out there, we’d spend just as much time trying to find ammo as anything else. And guns are loud, which draws more, and then things can get out of hand. So we’ve had to get a little creative. Trucks work okay for awhile, but eventually they get damaged after hitting enough, and the streets tend to be clogged with other cars, and that still takes time and gas. Best case scenario, you’re still only hitting a couple at a time. It’s also quite messy. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best, though I admit that we put a lot of time into the current one. I got to the side of the highway. There was a twenty foot wide wooden ramp built from the pavement that rested on the edge of the cement guardrail. Attached to the cement was a cable that went between this highway and one of equal height on the other side. There was also a small tower mounted in the middle of the highway on this side and on the one across with another cable about six feet above the first one. The lower one was technically two cables, and there was a small wooden footbridge build on it. The deadheads were about thirty feet away now, so I set up. I used a slip-link attached to the climbing harness I was already wearing and attached it to the top. I then took a special set of handles that we had made special for this and put them on the top cable. They attached to the top cable and then had a small “T” come down that you could sit on. So basically it was a zip line with a tiny bridge under it. I pushed myself off and started to gain momentum. I had to make it to the center to be completely “safe”. I got to the center and put on the breaks. I stopped pretty quickly and steadied myself. I then took out another strap I had and attached it to another cable that was coming in from the side. It was loosely attached to the main cable. That was our safety cable. We learned we needed the safety cable the hard way. One time a cable failed and one of our number went down with it. So just in case the cable broke, it was a plan B. I would be swinging pretty fast out to the side, but there was some bungee in that cable, so it would be rough, but I’d make it. Safely attached to the second cable, I swiveled around on my seat and watched the plan in action. The leading deadheads came to the edge of the ramp. Unfortunately, they have some sense of self-preservation, so just going off the edge doesn’t cut it. They need a little help. That’s where the ramp comes in. With the twenty foot ramp in place, ten to fifteen could stand side by side. For some reason they would naturally fan out. There was always a couple that would try to take the tiny wobbly path. I guess it was just too obvious of a “path” for them to not quite realize how dangerous it was. That was happening right now. Not even a gymnast would be able to navigate that path without the top cable to balance, and the deadheads were anything but. The first one got a full stride before the path twisted under him and he fell off the side. The very wobbly twisting path now caught the deadhead that was right behind him by surprise, so it looked like that one just stepped right off, though really it just missed the moving path. Now was when the plan really came together. The ones on the edge were sort of waiting their turn on the edge, but the deadheads behind them couldn’t see what was going on, so as they pushed forward, they basically pushed the front ones off the edge. It was just like any crowd. Crowds push and sway and the people on the edges always get pushed into things. Well in this case, that was being pushed off the edge. And once the momentum started, it usually happened quickly. In a matter of moments almost sixty bodies were summarily pushed of the edge by the ones waiting behind them. There were always a handful of stragglers in the back, but they would then try to walk the cable path. After an eighty foot drop, the ones on the bottom were either completely put out of commission or so badly broken that the net effect was the same. It took awhile to get set up, but once we had the rig in place, there was no faster way to kill hundreds of deadheads at a time. We moved the rigs from place to place. Really any high point that we could lead deadheads to you would do. The rest of the survivors and I were actually starting to make quite a dent. Once we rid an area of the massive crowds, then we could go in and get the stragglers. The progress was substantial, but man are there a lot of deadheads in this city!