by Rosaria, A.
Sarah went to clean the mess zombie Kevin made in the house while Priss prepared breakfast. With the smell of food, the old man finally came downstairs. He didn’t ask about the corpse in Sarah and Priss’s bedroom. He sat at the kitchen table, didn’t glance at or greet them, and ate his breakfast in silence.
Sarah waited for him to finish, containing her annoyance at him. Spacey stood up and eyed her with cold eyes. It startled her for a second. Frowning at him, she said, “I need your help with something.”
He stayed motionless and silent. Sarah went to the stairs and pointed up. “You coming?”
Without giving her an answer, he followed her upstairs and helped her carry Kevin outside the house. They dug three shallow graves and a deeper one. Sarah and Spacey put what remained of the three attackers in the shallow graves and lay Kevin to rest in the deeper one. It took hours of hard labor in boring silence to finish the job. The old man retreated into the house. Sarah lingered at the graves. Looking at the dirt patch, she wondered at the quickness a false sense of security could get you killed. Sarah patted her holster. She planned to never get caught by surprise again.
Sarah followed the old man inside. No. It didn’t feel right to end the day like this and stay inside as if nothing had happened. Sarah went upstairs to her room for her shotgun and headed back outside. She had to do something before feeling comfortable again while staying in the house.
Sarah checked her shotgun and revolver before entering the forest. With the revolver tucked in its holster and the shotgun in her hands, she headed in the direction she had seen the muzzle flashes last night. A breadcrumbs trail of killed zombies led to Kevin’s original crew. Ripped to pieces, body parts lay all over the destroyed tent camp. The stench hit hard. And the sight of half-devoured and disemboweled corpses became too much too soon. She stumbled forward, heaving hard to avoid hurling, and swallowed back bile trying to come up. Trembling, she stood back up, having managed not to puke. She took in the camp one last time. From the advanced consumed state of the bodies, they must have been immune. The zombies who attacked this group must have been ravenous. If Kevin had not escaped, he most likely would have ended like this. Much good that did him.
Sarah steeled herself. She had to undertake this. She needed to find out more. Taking care not to step on or touch any gore, she went through the things left at the abandoned campsite. No useful equipment. No weapons, either. Or anything edible. And no hints about who these people were. You would expect with two dead you would find at least a few things. The men who had followed Kevin had been armed. So had been Kevin. These two weren’t. It could be the reason why they had gotten gobbled up in the first place, not being able to defend themselves. The three who came looking for Kevin possessed no other equipment but the guns they carried. Why? Maybe they were part of a larger group who kept most of their equipment stored somewhere else. That group could still be near.
Sarah sighed. She’d gotten herself into a real mess again. She made her way back to the house to collect Spacey and shovels. Together, they returned to the campsite. The old man again said little, little being nothing. Sarah wasn’t a conversationalist herself, yet she didn’t mind talking when in the company of others. Not that she minded silence, but it got boring with time. She would’ve preferred to bring Priss along, but someone needed to stay behind, and Priss sucked at digging.
“It’s there,” Sarah said as they reached the clearing.
The old man took the scene in, a scowl forming on his face. “Savages,” he grumbled, and started digging.
It took the morning and most of the afternoon to dig a six-feet hole wide enough for two corpses. Having already dug graves for four people today, it took all Sarah’s reserves to dig this one. She glanced sideways at the old man. Covered in grime, he looked sixty, but he labored like a young man, barely breaking a sweat. Whatever genetic material he was born with, Sarah would have loved to have some of that herself. The shovel felt heavy in her blistered hands, and she dragged her aching feet. On her next shopping trip, she would buy some nice, sturdy work gloves and inlay gel pads for her boots.
They dragged the bodies near the hole and rolled them in. It went much faster filling the hole up. By the time they finished and returned home, the sun had sunk halfway under the horizon. Caked with dirt, and other gunk she didn’t really want to know what it was, she desperately needed a shower, and so did Spacey, only unlike her, he didn’t seem to care about cleanliness.
“Spacey, may I ask you something?”
The old man lay the shovel against the wall.
“Sir?”
“What.”
Sarah flinched back from the intensity with which the old man spoke. “Ahem, is there a lake or pond nearby?”
Spacey gestured for her to follow him. They went up to the asphalt road leading toward the mountains. After fifteen minutes of marching, they veered off into the forest. After a stroll, they arrived at a small cropping of rocks surrounded by trees, and a clear water pond. Not stopping, Spacey took off his jacket and shorts and sauntered right into it. He started rubbing the grime and blood off his body.
Sarah gaped at him, not knowing where to look or what to do. He looked over his shoulder at her and gestured for her to join him. She looked away, hiding her blush. She wanted to clean herself, but there wasn’t enough daylight left to wait for him to finish. Sarah gulped. Red-faced, she took off her clothes and hurried into the pond. She kept six feet between her and the old man and started cleaning herself with her back turned to him. She only relaxed when she noticed he didn’t bother to look at her, and enjoyed the experience of cleansing the filth she was covered in.
Spacey got out. Sarah tried not to gawk. No sixty-year-old man should have a body like that, with such a tight and firm ass. Without the grime, she noticed the scars all over his body. Bite marks. Burns. Punctures. His body read like a history of hardships.
Spacey faced her, his manhood swaying with the motion. With his hair rinsed and plastered over his skull, and his face free from dirt, he didn’t seem ancient. Not a young man, but not old at all. Her second guess placed him over his forties. Spacey grinned at her and put his clothes back on. Okay, he might be younger, but he still was a total nutcase.
Sarah wanted to stay longer in the cool, cold, and refreshing pond, but the sun was setting. She shuddered as a cold breeze went over her wet body. It made her hurry to put on her pants and sweater. Next, she strapped her holster at her belt. As they strolled back, she held her coat shut. They made good time. In silence. No conversing. No chit chats. It was fine with Sarah. She didn’t know how to feel about this all to know what to say if he asked her anything. Sarah opened the front door and inhaled. Dinner was ready, and it smelled really good.
“You’ve taken your time,” Priss yelled from the kitchen.
Spacey sat at the table. Sarah draped her coat over her chair and dropped down in it. Bringing them their dinner, Priss recoiled back, almost letting the plate fall out her hands. “Who the hell is he?!”
Spacey beamed at her.
“Oh… wow… it’s you… you cleaned up well. And you, Sarah…why are your nipples hard?”
Sarah glanced down and blushed. “It’s cold.”
Priss looked from Spacey back to Sarah. A smile broke over her lips.
“It was cold,” Sarah said. “Very cold.”
“I bet it was.”
Sarah wanted to hit Priss for teasing her, but she let it slide, because it was a good thing that Priss tried to have fun by pestering her, especially after what had happened last night.
“Just fetch me my food before you feed it to the floor, you clumsy cow.”
With a grin, Priss served dinner. They ate in content silence, Sarah fighting not to blush at Priss’s suggestive stares. Spacey ate unperturbed as if he were alone at the table. He looked good cleaned up. To imagine someone could change so much after removing a thick layer of grime. Spacey scraped the last bit of food in and stood up and went upstairs.
> “You’re looking very hungrily at him. Do you like his butt?” Priss said.
Sarah threw a towel at her. “Stop with that.”
Priss’s smile disappeared. “But Sarah, for reals, don’t get involved with him. He’s not right in the head.”
No one was right in their head after having survived this long, present company included. “I won’t. He could be my dad.”
“Oh, I see, so he went from being able to be your granddad to dad, isn’t it?”
“Come on, admit it, after having cleaned himself up, he looks much younger,” Sarah said.
Priss grinned. “And good-looking too.”
“I’m not going there.”
Priss stood up and started stashing the dishes away. “About what happened today… What are we going to do about it?”
“I guess we first try to survive the night,” Sarah said.
She observed Priscilla go about cleaning the dishes. For someone who freaked out from time to time, she did get herself back together rather quickly. Somewhere in her was steel. Sarah had noticed the same thing in Priscilla’s dad. However, she was glad Priss didn’t inherit her dad’s coldness, and was able to freak out when shit happened.
“Sometimes,” Priss said, “it seems that is all we end up doing.”
Sarah nodded. That, she couldn’t argue against. Most times, that was exactly what they did, and often not as well-sheltered like this.
Done with the dishes, Priss went to the stairs. “You coming?”
“I’ll be up in a bit.”
Sarah checked the shutters for a second time. Good, downstairs everything was secured tight. Before barring the front door for the night, she stepped outside. A full moon hung in the darkening sky. A lone howl went up in the distance. It seemed the zombies didn’t kill all the wolves. Every life saved was a good one. She got back inside.
Upstairs in her bed, she hoped against her better judgment that tonight would turn into a boring pre-apocalypse night.
A loud crash on the roof woke Sarah. She jumped out, grabbed her shotgun, and stumbled out the bedroom. Spacey stormed from his room naked, wielding his machete. Sarah didn’t have time to allow the naked man to bother her. She followed him downstairs and outside the house. The first sunray streaked its red fingers over the night. Sarah heard scraping from the roof. Spacey snatched her and held her tightly pressed against him. Her cheek flushed as she struggled to escape. Something fell hard and landed with a wet squishing sound on the spot she had stood at seconds ago. At her feet lay a large gray wolf; blood seeped out of every tear in its body and its entrails curled out from its belly.
Sarah stumbled back as Spacey let go of her.
“It found me,” Spacey said.
Sarah didn’t need to ask what he meant by that. The enhanced zombie found not only him, but it also found them all. Death found them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They ate breakfast together at the kitchen table. Sarah and Priss stirred their untouched soup. It killed her appetite thinking she might have to abandon a place she recently thought to be home.
Sarah looked up at Spacey. She wished she possessed his vigor to let things slide and go on with life. He slurped the soup from his spoon. To be able to chomp food down after all the crap thrown at them was admirable.
“What are we going to do?” Priss asked.
“Leave,” Spacey said.
“No, we won’t,” Sarah said.
“It will catch us if we don’t,” Priss said.
Spacey nodded. “The little one got it right.”
“I said no.”
They stared at her, Spacey with dispassionate curiosity and Priscilla with disdain. Priss must imagine she went mad. And she could be right. If it was crazy not wanting to always keep running, then she was crazy, so be it.
“We finally found a good place. The town is remote. We got stores full of supplies. A forest abundant with food. A natural water source. We got everything we need. I will not throw it all away because we are afraid of one zombie.”
Priss threw her hands in the air. “And what are you going to do about it?”
“We killed them before, we can kill them again.”
“You are not Ralph, and this,” Priss pointed at Spacey and herself, “isn’t his group. You are you, and I am me, and he is—”
“I don’t have to be Ralph to do something about our situation.” Sarah burst up from her chair and stormed away. She yanked open the door and breathed in deeply. “We stay or die trying,” she said, and slammed the door shut.
No way would she allow a too-dead-to-be-alive monster chase her away from this place, no manner how cunning or fast and nimble this monster was. She’d stand her ground and fight.
Sarah went outside. She’d promised Priss they would go shopping together, but today she needed another kind of shopping than the girls’ day out kind. She grabbed the cart and pushed it down the road to the town. First stop, the hardware store. Like any other store in town, it was like the owner had left for a break and could return any minute. She went through the store and got nails, hammers, lighter fluids, workman gloves, and several thick wooden broom poles. With the cart half full, she went to her second stop, the gun and ammo shop. On her first visit, she’d thoroughly searched the place; only the locked storage room in the back she’d left for later.
Sarah grabbed a hammer from the cart, a big thing you crushed stones with. It felt massive. Good. She assessed the thick padlock. This would be easy. She hefted the hammer high, holding it with both hands, and swung it against the lock. The force of the blow rung into her arms, and her hands stung with it. The lock remained in place, undamaged, gleaming in the sunlight that fell on it. Sarah swore. She took the better part of an hour to open the door.
She stood at the doorpost, sweating profusely as her eyes traveled all over the room. It was stocked with enough ammo to last her a lifetime. On top of a large ammo case, she found a medium-sized gun case. It was not the only prize. At the far wall hung a bulletproof vest and above it on a tray rested ballistic helmets. The armor would be great against humans but near useless against an enhanced zombie. The bulk would slow you down in a melee fight, but would be useful on days when people tried to shoot you out of your bed.
Sarah homed in toward the gun case like a bee to honey. With a trembling hand she unlocked the clasps. Her heart skipped a beat when she lifted the lid. A matte black boxy-looking submachine gun lay in the case. A P90. She muffled a squeal. She didn’t recollect if they were legal to own. She checked to make sure it was a P90 and not the semiautomatic version with a cut barrel. It was the real thing. A full automatic bliss of carnage. She couldn’t believe her luck. This thing could rip an enhanced apart in the time it took to flinch.
She placed the P90 back in its case. She gathered ammo for the P90 and the other guns they owned, including fast-loaders for her revolver. Last, she grabbed the bulletproof vests and three Kevlar helmets. You never knew when those might come in handy.
Sarah pushed the cart up the road. Its wheels squeaked under its load as they made their way back home at half the speed. She let go of the cart, wiped the sweat from her brow, and massaged her back as she watched Spacey and Priss barricading the windows with plywood. Spacey hammered the final nail in as she approached them. All boarded up, their home seemed like a fortress. This gave her hope of winning this. Inside, Sarah stored her newly acquired goods on the kitchen table. She didn’t stay, and returned to the town. Besides ammo and guns, they also needed food. You should never fight on an empty stomach.
She wanted to stock up, so as to be able to endure a long siege. On her way to the grocery store, she stopped at the clothing store and grabbed three large backpacks, the kind hikers often lugged around. At the groceries, she filled one backpack with cans and bottles. She also grabbed the first aid kit she found behind the counter and went through the store for anything else they needed for survival. The space left in the cart she filled with empty bottles. She had a plan for them.
On top, she lay the broom sticks. Stocked and loaded to the brim, she pushed the squeaky-wheeled cart back home.
Back safe inside the house, she didn’t waste time. She filled the backpacks and placed them near the back door. If they needed to bug out, she wanted them near an exit to grab. Next, she placed the empty bottles on the kitchen table. She filled them with anything flammable she could gather and stuffed them with rags. Homemade Molotov cocktails—the scourge of the dead. Finally, Sarah duct-taped butcher knives on top of the broomsticks. These makeshift spears she leaned against the wall at the windows, ready for use.
Sarah glanced at her new and shiny watch. Three hours to spare before dark. She had done everything she could to prepare. She went outside for a final check around the house. At the back, she found Priss hammering the last nail in a board shielding a window.
“Do you want to go for a stroll in town?” Sarah asked.
Priss wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Is that smart?”
Sarah shrugged and peered at the forest in the direction she expected the zombies to arrive. “I don’t know if we’ll get a chance later, if ever.”
Priss sighed. “Okay, show me where you got that pretty dress of yours.”
It was stupid. She grasped this. But they had some time left. And like she told Priss, this might be the last time they’d ever get the chance. Before going to the boutique, they made a stop at the hardware store. Priss picked up an axe, while Sarah grabbed a pickaxe. If she was about to go dig a hole again, this would make it that much easier and faster. They got some more duct tape—you never could have enough of the stuff—added some extra workman glasses, a saw, and nails to replenish the ones they used today to board the house up. Sarah left space in the cart for whatever Priss might find at the boutique.
Next stop was the clothing store. Priss went from dress to dress, wanting to try them all on. Sarah pushed her into the changing room with an armload of dresses, including a similar red one like the one she chose for herself the day before. It had been difficult finding one in Priss’s tiny size, but the store kept one in that size. After a long while and some encouraging, Priss exited the changing room. The dress fit her like a calfskin leather glove. Her hollow cheekbones and the dark patches under her eyes didn’t hide her beauty. She looked like an artistic dessert, to be admired and devoured by mouth and eyes.