by David Rogers
The cards, Austin’s favorite idle activity, caught her eye. There were over a dozen decks in the dresser, just to have them. Candice scooped one of the opened ones out and went over to the couch with it. The coffee table in front of it was the perfect height when sitting on the cushions for spreading out a game, or cards. She considered what to play as she opened the deck, then decided to try the version of Solitaire mom preferred again; Freecell.
It was more complicated than regular Solitaire, even allowing for some of the weird variants she’d learned about in the past few months. But Freecell had more of a puzzle feel to it. It was still random, since the cards were shuffled and dealt out with all the variance that entailed; but unlike most of the Solitaire versions she knew how to play, that was the end of the deck. Everything went down, face up and there to be seen, and it was a matter of figuring out an order to move and match them up into the suited stacks that was a win.
Candice tried the shuffle mom and Austin used, which she was still learning. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes the cards got away from her. This time a few escaped as she bent and flexed the cards back together following the shuffle, and she had to leave the couch to retrieve them. More slowly, she shuffled a few more times, trying to get a smoother feel for how to do the “bridge” as mom called it, then started dealing.
When the cards were all on the table, she considered them for a few moments, then reached for the box of cookies. Fortunately cookies were shelf-stable, which meant they could go into a tote or Ziplock after being opened. Candice prised the lid off and bit into one of the chocolate chip cookies. They were always dry when they came from a package, even when first opened.
But she knew better than to go open one of the cans of condensed milk, or even spoon out some instant, to mix up a glass to dunk or drink the cookies with. That was for cereal, and mom was insistent that they ration the milk out so there was some every day for a long time to come. It was important, mom said; it had what little girls needed to keep growing in it. And besides, even the condensed milk tasted funny compared to real milk.
Fortunately fruity blue Kool-Aid was almost as good as milk with cookies Munching and sipping, Candice considered the array of cards in front of her, trying to work out the best way to go about the game’s first moves.
* * * * *
“But we’ve got flashlights.” Milo said again, a definite note of wheedling in his tone.
“Two.” Jessica said, catching herself just in time and chopping off what she’d been about to add on. Namely, that she and Austin had flashlights; making it one more thing Milo hadn’t thought to bring.
“And only so many batteries.” Austin said, again. “And regardless, moving around after dark is a good way to get eaten. And it’s been a long day. When you’re tired, you make more mistakes.”
Milo sighed, but said nothing further as Austin drew a pistol and reached for the door. Jessica drew hers as well, holding it pointed at the base of the wall next to him with the safety on and finger off the trigger, ready to go but guarded against accidentally shooting him.
As she’d already noted from the map, Belle Glade sort of spilled out untidily to the north. On this side, the town didn’t stick to a fairly homogeneous clump that left it clustered together in the middle of the wide expanse of farmland. On the north side, they’d found several industrial and agricultural processing looking sites, but kept looking until they came across the second college.
Jessica hadn’t bothered looking closely at the sign, but she’d caught that it was something-or-another ‘Tech’. Which probably meant, considering the nature of the town, the institution had prepared students for work in the surrounding area; likely industrial or agricultural jobs. She frankly didn’t care, that was all in the past. What she did care about was the road outside the school, and the grounds themselves, were the closest to zombie free they’d seen since getting near Belle Glade. And it had her favorite thing for surviving a night in the apocalypse.
A second floor.
Austin had already tried the door to see if it was unlocked, which it was. Now he eased it open on hinges that creaked a little from disuse and the abuse Florida’s humidity could wreak on unmaintained metal. Even galvanized or treated metal. He studied the corridor beyond for a long moment, then gave a nod without looking at her before stepping through.
Jessica moved up and caught the door before it could close, stood for a moment to let him get two steps ahead, then followed. She was near the limit of her patience with Milo by now — it had been a long day, and she was tired — and she wasn’t entirely sure if she really cared if the Houseboater followed. But she heard him catch the door before it closed, and then his footfalls behind her.
That, at least, she could manage not to get completely irritated with him for. While she was better than she had been, she still made noise when she walked; even on a flat proper floor. Austin was a ghost when he wanted to be, rolling his feet down from heel to toe in a smooth motion that never seemed to leave an aural mark. She’d even seen him get up to a fast walking pace before and still be quieter than she was when she trotted after him. It was only when he broke into a full run that his height and mass would betray him, making him sound like the big man he was.
The first floor of the building they’d selected to clear, one of the smaller ones and on the edge of the campus, was still reasonably well-lit thanks to the setting sun streaming its light through the ever present high number of windows. The corridor stretched out ahead of them with doors spaced on either side. Jessica could actually see all the way to the end, and guesstimated there were only a couple of handfuls of classrooms or whatever on this floor.
There was a body sprawled face down on the floor about halfway down the hall, but it didn’t move even after they got closer and she was sure even the hardest hit zombie would have noticed them. There was also, she noted, a long since dried and widespread blood pool beneath and around it. She assumed, however or whenever the poor soul had met the end, it had been a ways back, and had been breathing when it happened. Something like that was about the only way to tell if a body had died fresh or dead, because until the decomposition got bad enough, human corpses looked just like walking zombies.
Well, and the smell. Even as bad as a person’s body could smell as it broke down, zombies were always worse. Fouler. Stronger. This body only smelled a little, one more thing that assured her it had been there a while and wasn’t about to hop up and start chewing.
Neither she or Austin felt it was necessary to do a proper full clear, at least of the first floor. She just stayed behind him, pistol at the ready, and glanced in the same doors he did as he worked his way steadily down the hall. There were a few more bodies in some of the rooms, some looking like dead humans, others like dead zombies.
One classroom held an actual zombie, but she noticed when she stopped and looked closer that it was one of the broken-neck ones. It was slumped against the far wall beneath the windows, just clear of the desks and tables so she had a good view of it, and only its jaw and eyes seemed to be moving. While a human would suffocate and die when the signals between brain and body were interrupted, zombies just kept chewing. They couldn’t move, but they didn’t breathe or need any of the other usual internal organs either; so all a broken neck did was remove mobility.
It was about as harmless as any zombie that hadn’t been introduced to major cranial trauma could be, so long as one stayed out of reach of its mouth. She kept moving; they had no need to bother with it.
At the end of the hall, Austin swiveled and pointed at the stairwell, and she nodded before swinging in behind him again as he headed back to it. Milo had his gun out too, but he was very carefully keeping it pointed at the floor, one handed. That was fine; he wasn’t waving it around, which was all Jessica really cared about. At this point, finding out Milo was a crack natural shot would be the shock of the apocalypse, so she mostly just wanted him to not manage to put a stray round into her or Austin.
S
he was confident they didn’t need Milo to deal with any zombies that might turn up, even if the second floor turned out to be harboring a lot of them.
When she emerged out into the upper hallway, she saw more empty corridor. There was a door that had been somehow bashed off its hinges at the end closest to her, but otherwise it all looked normal. Deserted, but normal. For the apocalypse anyway.
Austin went to the close end, checking into the rooms visually as he went. He took longer to peer through each door’s window, and so did Jessica, but they kept moving otherwise. He turned and went back in the other direction when he ran out of doors, continuing to check, all the way down to the other end. They were all the same as downstairs. A couple more bodies, one room had nearly half a dozen, but no movement. No threats.
“One of the middle rooms, I think.” Austin said in a low voice as he completed the visual check and faced back down the length of the hallway again. “On this side.” he went on, angling his head toward the northern side of the corridor. “In case we need to go out one of the windows.”
“Out a window?” Milo asked in a whisper.
“Just talk quietly, don’t whisper.” Jessica said, keeping her eyes on the hallway.
“Why?” Milo whispered back.
“It carries more than a low tone.” Austin said, in a low tone. “Just trust me.”
“Okay.” Milo said, more quietly, but he’d also dropped his voice about half an octave. Jessica wasn’t entirely sure if maybe he was trying to be funny or not, but the sharp sounds inherent to a whisper that tended to spread further and more noticeably than the aforementioned low tone were now absent.
“We’re on the second floor.” Milo went on. “How can we go out a window.”
“I’ve got a rope. And we hid the bikes in the landscaping on that side of the building.”
“Oh.”
Jessica glanced at Austin. “Pick one that looks good. Clear it and the ones next to it?”
“My thoughts exactly. Shall I?”
“Yes, please.” she said, cracking a smile at the slight bow he’d offered her.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
She stayed with him as he went back past the doors, until he stopped at one near the middle of the corridor. He glanced at her to see that she was with him and ready, then tried the knob. It didn’t open, even when he regripped it and flexed his fingers and wrist.
“Okay, so that probably settles that for the good.” he said, releasing the knob. He did, however, put his face up against the narrow glass window in the door and take a lengthy look into the room again, really studying it. “Yeah, we’re good.”
The door across the hallway was locked too, and similarly empty when reexamined. But three more he checked were open. Jessica followed him in as far as three steps from the door, but stood with her back to the wall and the Beretta outstretched before her and ready as he circled the rooms peering under the tables and looking behind the podiums and potted plastic plants, the easel in one of them, and into a closet in another that turned out to hold some machine part models that Jessica couldn’t really make out from across the room.
Everything was quiet. No zombies.
“Okay, this one, and we’ll barricade ourselves in.” he said when he finished eyeballing a sufficient amount of interior real estate to assure that nothing near where they wanted to spend the night held some lurking surprise. He flicked his eyes at the door he wanted, and Jessica went in. She kept the gun ready, but after a few seconds of reconfirming something hadn’t somehow appeared in the room in the brief period of time since they’d looked it over, she holstered the weapon and reached for one of the tables.
“Lend a hand Milo, let’s get this over with.” Austin said. “Oh, actually, wait a second.”
“What—” Jessica began to ask, but he vanished behind the wall, moving somewhere along the hallway. She closed her mouth and returned to pulling on the table, dragging it closer to the door to the carpeted classroom. Milo seemed to catch on when she had the table halfway to where she wanted to park it, and started helping.
They were on the third table, lining them up against the wall next to the door, when Austin reappeared. He had two of the plant pots in one hand, the plants nowhere to be seen. Jessica took a look and made herself not react. “Let me guess, potty?”
“It’ll come up. Sunrise is a long ways off. We’re safer if we stick to just this room, especially since we’re about to lose the light.” he said with a nod, dropping the pots near the teacher’s podium.
“Good thinking.”
“We’re going to use those to go to the bathroom?” Milo asked.
“Yeah, or it’s the carpet in the corner.” Austin pointed out, closing the door. “Actually, they’ll be in the corner anyway. What’d you expect, a toilet?”
“We … I just … okay.” Milo said hesitantly. His gaze flicked briefly at Jessica, and she rolled her eyes.
“As long as you’re not looking at me when I’m going, I can take it if you can.” she said. “I can stand you listening to me relieve myself a lot better than getting my face chewed off in the middle of the night because I was embarrassed.”
“Eyes off the lady when it’s private time, same as earlier.” Austin told Milo mildly. “We’re living rough until the zombies are out of the picture. Help me with these tables.”
Austin and Milo — mostly Austin — built a barricade with the tables to block off the door. Several went into a stack directly in front of it, and others were positioned and wedged in around those to add friction and weight if anything tried to move them. Austin also added several of the chairs as well, though Jessica suspected those would simply act more as a noise trap than actual deterrence if something started coming through the door.
While that was going on, Jessica picked the far corner from the door to set up for the night in. On the outer wall, it had windows right above it and running the length all the way across the room. Being away from the door afforded them time to react if the barricade was attacked. And it was in the corner, which gave them two walls to put their backs to if they were disturbed. She shrugged out of her backpack and sat down.
They had some military rations at the house, and she and Austin had each brought one; but they’d also brought more conventional food since they both agreed the purpose-made rations were good for more urgent or strained situations. The date codes on the shortest lived packages he’d found during his runs indicated they’d be good for a year, and he assured her they’d actually be edible for at least a couple more beyond what the package indicated.
For tonight though, she brought out the pieces to the little system she and Austin had come up with for their runs. Candles were actually sufficient to heat canned food, they just took longer than a proper fire. The candles, however, were small and less noticeable; quicker and more portable; and much easier to handle at the end of a day spent ducking past zombies.
The ‘system’ she set up consisted of a soda can, cut down to reduce its length, and further altered with four slits spaced around its circumference. Most of the cut off length of the non-slit parts was actually the full length of the can, folded and crimped to increase the thickness and offer more support. The can fit over a small candle more or less perfectly, and if the candle needed to be raised up as it burned down there was rarely any problem finding something or another to shove underneath it to bring the flame back to the right height.
The soda can was sufficient to hold a can of food over the flame, where it could slowly heat up. Liquid foods seemed to come up to temperature quicker than solids, but even corned beef hash — which was what she brought out of her backpack — simply needed regular mixing as the candle applied physics to the contents.
She opened the can using the Swiss Army Knife she carried in her harness and threw the lid at the inner wall of the room to get it out of the way. As it clattered aside, drawing glances from the men at the door, she closed the can opener tool and unfolded the knife blade to start poki
ng and loosening the hash so the heat would distribute a little more evenly.
“Okay, we’re in for the night.” Austin said quietly as she balanced the hash on the soda can. He dropped smoothly down into a cross legged position next to her and unslung his own pack.
“You’re going to cook on that?” Milo asked as he joined them. Jessica glanced at him as she removed a lighter from her equipment harness, watching as he sat down with his back to the door, and mentally shrugged. His call. And, she noted with a mercenary part of her mind that had grown more prominent in the months following the zombies’ appearances, if nothing else he’d act as an additional speedbump if anything got through the door.
“A little hot food goes a long way.” Austin said as he pulled the pieces of his own soda-stove out and started setting them up. “Especially after a day out and about.”
“I, uh, can I put my dinner over one?” Milo said. “After yours, I mean.”
“Sure.” Jessica said, sparking the lighter and lighting her candle. When it was going, she slid it under the can and put the lighter up. “But it’ll be a bit; it takes a while to heat up.”
“That’s okay. Thanks.” Milo said. He pulled off the two backpacks he was wearing and started rummaging in them.
“So, your first day face to face with the zombies.” Austin said in a clear bid to be conversational. “How are you holding up?”
“It … it wasn’t quite as … I don’t know, bad, as I was afraid of.”
“Good. That’s good. They’re dangerous, and always a threat if they’re anywhere near you, but unless you get surrounded it’s manageable. The thing to remember is to not panic, to keep your head. A lot of things are possible as long as you can do that.”