Like I said, the only time I’ve seen Wolfe bare his teeth, except when being confronted by a dangerous animal, is when he senses that the undead are nearby.
If I had to guess, I would say that what Wolfe senses is an emotion or a feeling that is repulsive and pure evil.
Myself, I could only seem to sense someone’s emotions when I could see the look in their eyes combined with their body language.
I don’t feel I need to be concerned because I can’t sense the emotions of the undead like Wolfe, I know all I need to know about the undead. I’ve seen them in action, I know what they do. I just don’t know why they are here. I’m glad I can’t feel their emotions, I’m not sure I could deal with that.
To be able to feel the emotions of the undead just by smell as Wolfe seems to be able to do, no wonder he bares his teeth every time he picks up their scent.
This morning I finished processing the deer in about an hour after I got up.
Last night more images of the first days again flowed through my mind as I tried to sleep.
I believe that everything happens for a reason. Well most things happen for a reason, there are a few things that I’ve seen that defy any logical reasoning.
The undead is a good example, I have not been able to figure out why they are here or why they do what they do. I can’t find any logic to explain their existence.
But overall, I still believe everything has a reason.
But I didn’t know if my dreams were preparing me for something to come or if I have done or seen something that just triggered them to start up again.
I hadn’t had these particular nightmares for a long time until recently.
Maybe feasting on this deer and moving on to a friendlier environment would put my mind at rest, I could only hope.
I had my backpack full of dried deer meat and I had a bundle of dried meat that I could tie to the top of my walking stick. Wolfe and I had eaten most of the large pieces of meat or would finish them off before we broke camp to continue on our journey.
The content feeling of having a full stomach makes me want to maybe hang around here for another day before we move on.
I’ll think about that more after we return from the little village below.
If Wolfe isn’t in any hurry to move on, I think I could handle another day of rest, we’ll see what happens.
But first it was time to see what we could find in the buildings below. I was hoping to find more lighters and maybe a few more arrows.
As I looked down at the holes in my shoes, I also thought a new pair of boots would also be nice, boots were something that I couldn’t find just anywhere now days.
I knew the Indians had made moccasins out of deer hide. I had tried that and of course I had to add moccasin making to my list of things that I wasn’t very good at.
I had to face the facts, I was about as much of an outdoorsman as I was ever going to be. That thought was sort of scary considering that the outdoors and the wilderness was where I had to live and survive.
I had also tried going in my bare feet, like Wolfe, but quickly discovered that my feet weren’t made to be shoeless.
In the old days, I would have tossed my boots in the trash months ago, but not now, they were better than nothing.
My old boots didn’t look very good, but they were comfortable and they mostly still did the job.
If by any chance I did find some new boots, I think Wolfe has dibs on my old ones. I’ve caught him more than once eyeing them up as they sat next to my blanket at night while I slept.
I’m sure his plans for the boots didn’t include him trying to wear them, so Wolfe didn’t care how many holes they had. I found it humorous to think about Wolfe chewing on my shoes like an ordinary dog. Knowing Wolfe, and those teeth of his, I couldn’t see the shoes lasting more than two chomps before they were little more than small shreds of leather.
I just hope he can resist the temptation to try out my old boots until I find a decent replacement.
But it was time for less thinking and more action, I thought as I stood and worked the cramps out of my muscles.
Wolfe saw me get up and came running over by my side, so I slipped on my bow and grabbed my stick and we started down over the hill. Wolfe had a relentless work ethic, even as a pup, that I had been unable to match over the last two years. I just did my best to keep up with him so I he wouldn’t think I was too much of a slouch.
We walked down the hill towards the buildings, taking a wide path around the bodies of the undead that we had put down yesterday. I didn’t want to be around the blood or the bodies any more than I had to be.
If I accidentally tripped and fell on the way down and if I would land in their blood or on one of their body parts, I could be in serious trouble, so I took the long way around to reach the town.
It wasn’t like I had anywhere to be that I needed to hurry and take shortcuts. If nothing else over the last few years I had learned to use my head and to do things right. There was no reason to hurry up and die, that was going to happen soon enough without me giving it a helping hand by being stupid.
It was only a few hundred feet past the last of the dead bodies before we entered the complex of buildings.
I walked slowly through the buildings and watched Wolfe’s reaction as we approached each building.
Wolfe remained calm and unconcerned as we made the walk through the small grouping of buildings.
Despite Wolfe’s demeanor telling me that all was safe for the moment, he stayed by my side in his normal alert and all business mode as I began to take a closer look.
The first building I wanted to search was the building that I thought had been a hunting supply store from the few letters that showed through the overgrown vegetation that had grown over the signs on each of the buildings.
Before going inside, I pulled off the vines that had grown over the middle of the sign to see if I had been right.
Almost, but not quite.
The sign read Huntsville Resort Supply instead of
Hunting Supply like I had guessed it would be.
I knew my chances of finding what I needed had just dropped in half, but since the store still had the word supply in its name, I hoped that I would find something of use.
I pointed at the door and Wolfe ran over and sniffed at it for a moment then looked at me calmly and waited.
I then slowly opened the door and as Wolfe had been trained, he looked at me and waited for instructions before he went inside first.
If I had felt that the undead were right inside, I would never have sent Wolfe inside, he was my eyes and ears and my best friend, and I would never send him into harm’s way intentionally.
When I felt conditions were probably safe, I would let him go inside first just to make sure.
When Wolfe’s senses would indicate there was danger nearby, we always found the best approach was to make the undead come to us or avoid them altogether.
But all indications were that we were alone for now.
I followed Wolfe and walked inside the building.
The inside of the building was what I had expected to see as far as finding shelves overturned and the store being generally trashed. In the early days after the bomb had been dropped, panic had led to people looting all the stores and each other’s homes in search of food and supplies. By the end of the first month, few places had been spared, so the sight inside the store was pretty much the norm now days.
I looked around to try and determine what kind of things I would find here.
It appeared that the store was more of a food and convenience supply store and not a store that sold hunting and camping supplies.
After quickly glancing across the inside of the store, I gave Wolfe his instructions, “Wolfe, door!”
Unlike us humans, Wolfe liked having a job to do and looked forward to me giving him instructions.
Wolfe ran back to the doorway and sat down, taking up his post as the lookout while I checked out
the store.
As I studied the store, I saw what food that hadn’t been taken had been eaten by insects and rodents or laid on the floor rotted, dried and decomposed.
There was some canned food left, but I had no idea what was in the cans since the labels had dried out and fallen off the cans. The labels had probably fallen off by the end of the first year after the power had gone out shutting down the air conditioner and heaters leaving the contents of the store exposed to the elements.
I ignored the cans and walked on by.
If times would have been more desperate, I would have taken them, but with my backpack completely full of fresh deer meat, I just didn’t have any room for them.
Besides, cans are heavy.
I walked to the back wall that was lined with refrigeration units and freezers. I couldn’t see through the glass on the doors because they were covered with a greenish dried film. The thick film was probably what at one time had been a thick layer of mold from when the power went out and everything inside spoiled and rotted.
I pulled one of the doors open and looked inside. What had been inside had long ago decomposed and now formed one large pile of dried slime on the bottom of each of the units.
It had been so long ago, that even the smell inside the coolers was gone. In fact, the inside of the coolers smelled better than the rest of the building or even the entire town or resort.
I made one quick pass through the store but there wasn’t anything of interest, so I started walking back to the front of the store.
I stopped at the single checkout station located near the front out of curiosity.
It had been a long time since I could remember going through a checkout line in a store.
It brought back some memories that made a smile briefly cross my face.
One day I had taken Jamie with me to the store to buy some milk, bread and cheese so Kelly could make tomato soup and grilled cheese for lunch.
I paid the clerk and picked up the groceries and was about to start going out to the car when I noticed Jamie was still talking to the man at the cash register.
Jamie had picked up a candy bar, put it on the counter and handed the man a five-dollar bill from her Monopoly game.
Kelly and I had been using the Monopoly game to teach her about money before she started the first grade.
She had learned that money was used to buy things and somethings cost more money than other things.
But the part she hadn’t learned yet was the difference between real and play money, that was going to be the next lesson.
She gave the man five dollars in Monopoly money and held out her hand, waiting for her change, like she did when we played Monopoly.
I walked back towards the clerk as I reached into my pocket to get change to pay for Jamie’s candy bar.
The man saw me coming, smiled and shook his head and waved me off.
He handed Jamie a penny for her change and put the candy bar in a little bag.
Jamie picked up the bag and proudly walked my way.
I dropped a dollar on the counter when Jamie wasn’t looking, thanked the clerk as we left the store.
The smile quickly faded as other memories about Jamie and her Monopoly money crept into my mind, other memories that I wanted to forget.
I quickly walked through the checkout counter and was about to leave when I spotted a shelf that had been knocked over on the floor. It was one of the small racks of shelves that the stores had placed at the checkout as a last effort to sell you something before you walked out the door.
On this shelf were twenty red, yellow and blue plastic Bic lighters.
I quickly scooped them up and dropped them in my pocket.
It made me feel relieved to know that the visit here wasn’t going to be a total waste of time.
I rolled the shelf over to make sure there weren’t any more lighters hidden underneath.
I didn’t find anymore lighters but I found something almost as good.
There were three packages of what looked like wire tongs. On closer inspection I discovered that they were flint lighters that were used to light propane torches.
I quickly picked them up and put them in my pocket with the Bic lighters. If nothing else, they could one day save me from the embarrassment of explaining to Wolfe why he had to eat raw meat. Hopefully I would be able to maintain my image as a magician in Wolfe’s eye for a while after I used my final lighter.
After one last glance at the store, I knew there was nothing else here that Wolfe and I could use. Not even the five-hundred dollars that laid in the tray of the open cash register. I could use it to help get a campfire started, but kindling was too easy to find to justify making room to take it with me.
Wolfe was waiting at the door, laying in the sun with his nose on his paws as he watched the street outside.
He stood up and wagged his tail briefly as I approached. When I bend down and gave him a pat on the side, he went back into business mode and led me out into the street to continue our search of the town.
The search of the rest of the complex didn’t take us long.
Half of the buildings were bunk houses. One building was the mess hall, the others were office buildings or empty storage buildings.
There was nothing remaining that could be used in our world.
Computers and smart phones, items that I had little use for even before the bomb was dropped seemed to be lying around everywhere.
Paper and pens were scattered around on the floors in the office buildings. I could write notes and letters, but there was no one left for me to send a note or a letter.
But then a thought ran through my mind.
“Why not?” I asked myself. I had always wanted to write a book, but I could never come up with anything to write about.
I now had a head full of ideas of what to write about, but unfortunately there wasn’t anyone left to read it.
I decided to gather up some of the paper and pens anyhow and I slipped them in my pouch.
“Maybe someday, if I wrote about what had happened, someone might just find it,” I thought. “If not, in my old age it will give me something to remind me about who I was and what I had seen.”
I laughed out loud.
It really didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I just felt like it was something I should do. I chuckled about my thoughts about in my old age. The chances of me reaching an old age were about as likely as me finding that a new McDonalds had just opened at the end of the next street.
“However, writing my story might help me keep my sanity for a little longer,” I chuckled. It might give me a way to pour out all my pent-up frustrations and maybe even stop the nightmares that had been haunting me.
I called Wolfe and we started to slowly walk through the complex on our way back to our camp.
The trip down to the resort wasn’t a total waste, I did find some lighters and some flint fire starters.
I had even come up with an idea to do something that I had never managed to do in my old life. It seemed like a good idea if I could manage to survive long enough to actually do it.
It was also good that there weren’t any of the undead around today to make things difficult for us. So, all in all, it was turning out to be a nice diversion from our normal daily routine.
In a life where each day is a struggle to just survive and find something to eat, I’ve learned to appreciate the little things that I overlooked or didn’t appreciat in my past life.
Wolfe and I were half way back through the complex when something caught my eye behind the buildings on my right.
I walked between two of the buildings to get a better look.
What grabbed my attention was that I thought I spotted the colors of red and white jumping out through the thick green canopy. A simple key to surviving was the ability to detect movement out of the corner of my eyes and to quickly take note of anything unusual.
What had caught my eye fit the unusual category as being something that
looked out of place in that clearing.
It wasn’t a clearing any longer, the weeds, shrubs and small trees were well on their way to taking back what at one time had been a clearing. Now it was more of an overgrown thicket.
But there was something odd about the view.
I walked back through the brush and pulled the vines from one of the structures that had caught my eye with the hint of color showing through the over grown vines and weeds.
I smiled when I recognized what was under all the growth.
They were archery targets. I tried to reconstruct the layout of the archery range in my mind as I looked around.
It was then I spotted the small shack that stood out behind the supply store.
If I was right, that shack would be where people staying at the resort would come to rent a bow and receive probably a dozen or so arrows to shoot at the targets.
I started walking towards the shack, hoping that I just might get lucky and find some arrows before I left after all.
It took a few minutes to fight my way through the thorn bushes that had grown all around the shack, but I was finally standing in front of the little shack.
The front of the shack had a rotted awning that hung down over the front of the little building.
I grabbed the awning and pulled, the rotted material tore away from the building and fell to the ground at my feet.
The upper part of this side of the shack was open so you could see what was inside and the bottom half resembled a counter at an ice cream shop. Apparently, the awning was raised when the archery range was open for business and the resort’s customers could rent equipment from the employee that stood on the other side of the counter.
On the back wall inside the shack hung six bows and six quivers of arrows.
I crawled over the counter and grabbed one of the quivers and pulled out an arrow to examine it.
Apocalypse- the Plan Page 30