The house was overgrown and old but had obviously been really nice at one point. It had the look of a Southern Plantation home. Like Brenda imagined the summer cottage for Scarlett O’Hara would’ve looked like. It wasn’t quite a grand old estate, but it wasn’t just a house by the lake either. They walked up the stairs where they could hear the men inside calling out which rooms were clear. The large wraparound porch featured several rocking chairs which the girls made a beeline for. Brenda had an impulse to stop them but then realized that was an old-world impulse. No one today was going to care if the girls played on the chairs or not as long as they did so quietly.
“Looks like it’s all clear. You guys want the tour?” Eric asked. Brenda nodded, and all the girls jumped up out of the chairs with interested looks on their faces. There was no telling what kind of cool stuff might be inside the old house. Eric smiled at the reaction he’d gotten with his offer and led them into the foyer of the home.
The wooden floor creaked as they walked in looking around at the interior of the hundred-year-old home. It reminded Brenda of the Bed and Breakfast places she’d stayed at along the coast. If those Bed and Breakfast Inn’s had been boarded up and left to rot in the heat and humidity of the Florida summers. There was the strong musty smell of mold throughout. Brenda totally understood when Myriah mentioned she thought the place looked like a house out of a horror movie.
“I used to think the same thing.” Eric responded with a bemused expression on his face. “I spent a few weeks here every summer and I always thought it looked like one of the houses off that Goosebumps show. My aunt was pretty formal, but she made sure I had fun. There should be a ton of board games still in the hall closet that we can get into. Most important this place has six bedrooms, so we should all be able to sleep in an actual bed tonight!”
The girls let out muted squeals at the announcement of sleeping in actual beds. Zoey had to quickly be reassured she’d still get to sleep with her sisters. They’d mostly been sleeping in cars since leaving the church. The cars had been a massive improvement over sleeping on the hard floor in the stinking closet at the church though. Truth be told, the musty smell of the old house wasn’t that bad when you considered the smells they’d gotten used to contending with on a daily basis. Eric took them up and down the stairs and gave them a humorous tour of the big old house. The girls loved the two rooms he led them into which were covered in pink frills and had dolls and mirrors galore.
Brenda smiled to see the girls actually seeming to have fun for once. That was something she hadn’t seen in a long time. They’d been so focused on surviving that they hadn’t had time to live. It was going to be good for them all to have this break in the struggle to survive.
“How long are you thinking we should hang out her?” Brenda asked Eric while the girls were arguing over who got which room and which beds were the best. They’d probably all just end up in the same bed in the same room but for now they were enjoying claiming their spaces. It was completely dark now so they’d setup a couple of the battery powered lanterns they’d brought into the house to make sure everyone could see. Tim had already been sent out to the front porch to keep watch. Brenda had the midnight to four in the morning watch which she wasn’t at all excited about.
“I was thinking a few days. A week max. There’s just the one road in so if the Zombies did catch wind of us, we’d have a hard time fighting our way out of here. I think we should be ok for a week or so though as long as we don’t make a lot of noise. “
“What do you think we should do next?” Brenda asked him. A couple of the guys had wandered over to listen in. The pastor stood towards the back of the group of men but seemed to be listening intently.
“I’m hoping the Zombies will wander off given enough time. Or, at least get away from the back roads. I’d still like to head for Disney and see if we can’t make one of the resorts work as a new home. We just need to figure out a different way to get there. The place may be crawling with Zombies but there’s also plenty of defensible locations and tons of supplies there. Plus, the guys and me know the whole area like the backs of our hands which will help out a lot.”
“Then what?” The pastor asked.
“What do you mean?” Brenda asked him. Eric ignored the question and focused on settling into the couch in the living room. From the couch he’d have a good view into the front yard through the large bay windows.
“I mean is just surviving really going to be good enough for us? Shouldn’t we be looking for other people? The military, the police, the government, someone’s bound to have put a place together that survived. Surviving is great but I’m ready to start living again!” A couple of the men nodded along with the pastor as he spoke.
“We can’t start living later if we don’t survive for now.” Eric answered from the couch. He seemed to think that put an end to the conversation. He pulled the brim of his hat over his eyes and settled into the dusty couch.
Brenda said goodnight to everyone and headed up the stairs to check in with the girls. She needed to try and get some sleep too. She set her alarm to wake her up for the balls to four watch she’d gotten stuck with. She thought about what the pastor had said as she walked up the stairs. Those girls going to bed up there were her whole world. She absolutely hated that they may end up living out their lives stuck in concrete tunnels under a deserted theme park eating decades old turkey legs. She didn’t see any way around it for right now though.
She settled into the edge of the bed next to the two youngest girls and closed her eyes to try and go to sleep. She knew it probably wasn’t going to happen.
Chapter 24: Scarecrows
Kyler woke up with an aching back. He figured out he was itchy because he was lying in a pile of dirt and straw. He shifted his body around a little to try and get more comfortable. He was also working on wiggling around to get a good angle to scratch the myriad of places that were itching him. Working his fingers under his shirt to get at yet another itchy part of his lower back he sighed when he finally reached it. He kept looking around as he began vigorously scratching. The spot he was lying in was under a heavy canopy of trees. He felt like the sun had probably been up a couple of hours already based on the light filtering down through the leaves.
“How are you feeling?” Mike asked him from a couple of trees away where he was sitting up on guard duty.
“Like crap. Where’s Seth?” Kyler asked the question casually. He felt a cold pit begin to form in his stomach when he saw the reaction to his question in Mikes eyes.
“He didn’t make it. I buried him last night then carried you this far before I had to stop since I couldn’t see anything.” Mike put his head down like he was awaiting judgement.
Kyler went through a rash of emotions. The first was sadness. Tears welled up in his eyes as he pictured the young Seth just sitting in the back of the truck. The boy had been confident Kyler and Mike would take care of him. That triggered a rush of guilt that they’d failed at keeping the boy safe. Then came the anger. Anger directed mostly at the adult who was with them. The adult who had insisted they head for a house that more than likely didn’t have anyone living in it anymore. Why the rush? Because Mike, the adult, wanted to ditch the boy and get rid of that responsibility. A responsibility the old alcoholic couldn’t handle.
Mike had seen Seth as a burden instead of as a living, breathing kid. Mike had been more interested in self-medicating to help himself make it through this mess than he’d been in making sure Seth and Kyler made it. Kyler realized he’d let it happen. Then Kyler realized another thing that he grabbed and held on to like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver. No one was equipped to deal with what they were dealing with. Everybody was either dead or a Zombie except them. At least that they’d seen. They were walking hip deep through mud trying to make it somewhere while demons swooped down all around them.
Instead of giving in to the anger that boiled up in him Kyler chose to go over to Mike and gave him a hug. Mike c
ompletely broke down. He began sobbing all over Kyler’s shoulder. He started trying to say how it was his fault this had happened, but Kyler interrupted him.
“This isn’t anybody’s fault. We kept Seth alive longer than I’ve seen anyone around here live. No one’s equipped to deal with this crap. Seth definitely wasn’t. Let’s just focus now on ourselves. I think it’s ok for us to be selfish. I think we have to be selfish if we want to survive.” Kyler finished talking. They held each other awkwardly until the sobs died down. Once they’d regained most of their composure they stood up and gathered their stuff together and kept on walking south. Such was a day of life and death in the apocalypse.
“You still think we should head for Westerly?” Kyler asked after they’d been walking for a while. They were speaking in normal voices now as they hadn’t heard a Zombie screech in a couple of hours. Besides, they were making so much noise beating their way through the woods that any Zombie in the vicinity was going to hear all that ruckus before it heard them talking anyway.
“I say we do. If anyone there is still alive, we can bring some closure to them. If not, we know the area, we know where the supplies are, and I have a ton of guns and ammo in my house. I’d be a little embarrassed by that actually if the end of the world hadn’t managed to come around when it did. So, at least we’ve got that going for us.”
“Works for me.” Kyler answered. He was thinking that having some place to go was good as it gave them a sense of purpose. He didn’t really see a huge point in it. Not if everyone turned out to be dead. If that was the case, they might as well find a supermarket around here somewhere and just sit in it until they ran out of food and needed to go find another abandoned supermarket. That didn’t sound like a great way to live. Maybe to survive, but not to live.
His whole body was in pain. He could only imagine that Mike either felt similar or worse. They walked in silence through the woods. They stopped periodically to listen and see if they heard any screeches or anything else off in the distance. So far, they hadn’t heard or seen anything. Kyler started to realize what a huge state Maine was. Then he thought about the country itself. Driving down the interstate you passed mile after countless mile of just woods or open fields on the side of the road.
Those areas would be sparsely populated. Some of the people living in those areas were bound to be paranoid people with guns. There was bound to be other people out there. He couldn’t think of a single reason why him and Mike would’ve been the only ones to end up surviving across the whole country. Where there were survivors there would be female survivors. Not that Mike’s company wasn’t pleasant but at some point, Kyler figured he’d rather be waking up in piles of pine straw with a girl than with an old, scruffy alcoholic.
They needed to find a group of survivors and then find a place out in the middle of nowhere to turn into a new home. Or, maybe there already was such a group and they were already headed out to build a new home. In that case they needed to figure out where those people were headed and join them. Either way Kyler felt his pain lessen and a small bit of spring return to his step as he day dreamed about the future. Specifically, about different girls in the pine straw. He was a teen boy after all.
They kept up the march through the woods. Kyler had knocked most of his pine straw and dirt off himself by this point. Mike seemed to think it made good camouflage and kept a bunch of it sticking off his clothes in different places. He looked like an oversized scarecrow with poor fashion sense beating his way through the woods. Kyler longed for his phone, so he could take a picture of the guy. Not that there was anywhere to post or send it. The only person to share it with currently would be Mike.
Every time they hit a clearing in the woods, they checked the location of the sun and the time of day to make sure they were still headed south. Mike had his wristwatch on so as long as that kept the time correctly, they should be good to go. They were both pretty good at this thanks to a course they’d put together with some local navigators back home. They’d taken the troop for a weekend on a couple of sailboats to practice navigating by the stars. They were good at it but neither one of them would have been willing to back up the claim that they were headed due south. They were both pretty confident that they were headed on a southerly course. That was really all you could expect from a generation used to using GPS to get anywhere.
“What if we get a boat?” Mike stopped to look over curiously at Kyler. They’d been walking for a while now in silence. Kyler’s sudden outburst had interrupted Mike’s thoughts around when they should stop for the night. It wasn’t like they were in a huge hurry to get somewhere. Especially now that they didn’t need to worry about catching Seth’s relatives. Mike had always known that’d been a long shot anyway.
“A boat for what?” Mike asked after Kyler and him both successfully navigated their way over a fallen log then clambered up and down the steep banks of a small culvert. Mike hoped they were getting close to some sort of civilization again. That seemed like a possibility since the culvert looked like it was man made.
“If we get a boat, we can just cruise down the coast until we get somewhere warm and then setup there. We might even be able to find an island where none of this stuff is happening. Maybe somewhere down in the Caribbean where it’d be nice and warm all year long. Eat coconuts and limes and live like kings.”
“Hmmm. The boat’s probably a good idea. As long as we can find one. I’m sure other people living on the coast probably had the same idea. I’m also not sure the Caribbean would be the place to go. Or, any island for that matter. Seems to me that any island that survived all this would be pretty averse to having random people join them. I know I wouldn’t want to have anyone show up who might bring the Zombie virus with them on top of eating all my food.”
Mike had succeeded in taking a little bit of the wind out of Kyler’s sails with the infuriating real-world logic he applied but both of them agreed the boat was a good idea. A lot better than hiking their way across New England until a group of those fast Zombies saw them. If that happened, they were as good as dead. At least on the ocean the Zombies wouldn’t be able to get at them. A few more minutes of discussion and they expanded their dream boat from one on the ocean to one in a river near here that they could take down to the ocean.
They picked up the pace when they hit an open field on the other side of the culvert. Their eyes roaming in search of a river that they could use to get out of here. Even if they could just find a boat on the edge of a big lake or pond it’d be nice to be able to take the boat out to the middle. In the middle of a lake laying on a boat they could spend the night sleeping under the stars without having to worry about a Zombie stumbling on them while they slept.
Chapter 25: On Little Cat Feet
“Hey Don! You need help?”
Randy leaned back further against the wall he’d been squatting against. He’d been trying to think of his next move. He’d known the guard was probably still walking around outside but hadn’t known how to go about dealing with him. He’d figured the sounds of the gunfire from inside the admin offices was probably assumed to be the commander killing Randy for screwing up the scavenging mission. That made a lot more sense than Randy overpowering the commander and his man in the hallway and then shooting both of them. The guard from outside had probably just been wondering what was taking so long for them to call him in to help remove the body.
Randy watched as the guard walked down the hall with his pistol still in the holster. He hadn’t even bothered to get his M-16 out of the van. Randy stood up and aimed his weapon at the back of the guard’s head. His mind was moving a million miles a minute as he made a snap decision not to execute the prick quite yet.
“Freeze asshole! Put your belt on the ground with the gun in the holster then take three steps forward or I’ll shoot you in the back of your head right now!” Randy was shaking as he held the pistol extended with his finger on the trigger. He was ready to shoot if they guy went for his gun. The guard mus
t’ve sensed he was serious since he slowly undid his belt and put it on the floor with the pistol still in the holster. Then he took three steps forward and just stood there with his hands in the air.
“Get down on your knees. Ok. Now lie on the floor with your arms extended out in front of you.” Randy was making this up as he went along. He didn’t want the guard to be able to do anything to him when he collected the discarded weapon. He was struggling to remember the scenes from war movies where they captured people and had to disarm them. He needed to channel Rambo. He put on the guard’s belt and got the holster situated then ordered the guard to roll over on his back. He wanted to talk to him face to face.
“How’d you manage to kill the commander?” The guard asked Randy once he’d rolled over. He still had both hands elevated above his head to comply with Randy telling him to keep his hands up. Otherwise, he didn’t look even half as scared as Randy thought he should.
“Shut up. You’re going to answer my questions. Can you drive a boat?” Randy asked.
“Sure can. Kind of a requirement for being in the Coast Guard. At least if you’re stationed on an island. Why? Do you need lessons?” Randy couldn’t believe this guy. He was laying on the floor with a man who’d just killed two other guys standing over him with a gun and he was being an ass? This was the same guy who’d obviously planned on making a play for Kelly after carrying Randy’s corpse out to the compost pile. Maybe he should just kill him and look for another hostage. They were on an island. It shouldn’t be that hard to find people who could drive a boat. Or, sail a boat, or row a boat, or whatever it took to get him and Kelly off this damned island.
A Small World Page 18