“Can we do that?” Tobias asked? “Teach them how to be wild again?”
“Can we adapt them?” Harper cut in “I mean, can we claim one as a pet? I love Bert, I’d take care of him.”
Cody hadn’t thought about any of them wanting to take any of the animals under their wing and be their protectors like he was going to do with Otis. He’d thought he might have an argument on his hands trying to get them to help with their care and feeding. He should have known better, they had all been on a field trip to the park on a Saturday instead of playing video games or watching movies. It was because they all loved the animals.
“Um, okay.” he said. “Me and the bear are old pals but you guys can take any of the others, make them your pets.”
“I prefer to call them my spirit guides.” Swan said and everyone else chimed in with terms like partner, companion, helper and a few others.
Cody held up his hands. “Okay, okay. No offense intended. You’re the caregiver though. They’re your responsibility but we’ll have to share the workload for the rest. Some of them are too old to be turned out and probably wouldn’t want to leave their pens anyway. Teddy the buffalo is almost twenty and mom has him on supplements to keep him healthy and Mille is blind in one eye and can’t hardly see out of the other. There are some others that need special care but I think most of them will be okay running wild.”
The talk of the animals took their minds off what was just outside their gates, the fact that none of their families had come to try to rescue them and the realization that they were alone.
The panther and the wolves needed meat as their primary diet but there was plenty in the cooler for now. Otis and the polar bears were a little more flexible since they would eat virtually anything. There was plenty of pellet food for most of the park animals as well as a loft full of hay for the winter months. The grass hadn’t started to die off yet so grazing was still good and if they turned them out now, the bagged food should last them through the winter. They’d worry about getting more when the time came, they had themselves to think about too.
The mood in the house lightened. The highly adaptive nature of kids had pushed aside last night’s fears. They weren’t going to get torn apart, they had a safe place to stay and they had a basic plan to stay alive. While they’d been busy with their tasks all morning, Murray had been on the computer downloading all the free books he could find and deleting files that were useless to them now. Forty gigabytes of accounting information, tax records and old invoices were no longer deemed important. The credit cards had bought all the important information that could be downloaded and he wanted to get more. He wanted the classics and histories. He wanted every book ever written that would tell them how to do something, solve a problem or fix a machine. He wanted knowledge and he knew anything he didn’t save could very well be lost forever.
Resolve settled in that they were on their own and a sense of excitement seemed to spread through them. Each still harbored sadness for their families but there wasn’t time to sit around and mourn. They had things to do if they didn’t want to join them. Murray gave them a sense of urgency about the preparations they needed to make and Cody gave them the excitement of having something wild and exotic as their very own, an unthinkable thought yesterday.
Cody talked as they ate, filling them in everything he could remember about the Park. There was wild game inside the fences: a lot of rabbits, squirrels and raccoons. They flourished without any natural predators. The river had fish and as gross as it sounded, they’d grow fat and plentiful with all the dead bodies that were probably floating in it. Unfortunately, the carnivorous animals had never needed to stalk their prey, it was always scooped into a dish for them. Cody was certain that they still possessed the predatory instincts of their ancestors. They just needed to be awakened. They could teach them. As they talked of the animals and gave Murray lists of books they needed, Cody leaned back and took it all in. He tried to see the big picture, not just the day to day things they were talking about. He tried to see where they’d be and what they’d need by Christmas when the snows could be a foot deep and their only heat was the fireplace.
He looked at their clothes and mentally inventoried the human food stores. Mostly junk food in the gift shop and souvenir store. He’d helped unload the delivery truck for the snack bar and knew there would be cans of chili and nacho cheese, frozen cases of hamburgers, french fries and hot dogs but all of that would spoil if Murray was right and they only had a few days of power left. They’d have to cart it all over to the meat storehouse but even then, they’d only have another week before the diesel ran out. They needed canned goods. Soups and veggies and things like that. They’d have to go into town sooner or later. They’d have to make a supply run for food and clothing but he didn’t even want to think about that.
Water was abundant thanks to the hand operated pump in the old house, unless the pipes froze. Too much, there’s just too much that can go wrong and leave us helpless, he thought.
Winter was coming. Everyone was dressed for early fall. Shorts and hoodies, tennis shoes or high tops. They needed thick clothes, heavy jackets, good boots, gloves and hats. There were a few items in the gift shop, like sweat shirts and animal themed blankets, but nothing that would sustain them through a long Iowa winter.
Cody needed some fresh air and a reprieve from the excited chatter. He pushed his chair back and stepped outside. The morning was still cool and brisk but the sun was up and the day would be pleasant.
He stared at the gate in the distance, nearly hidden from view by the snack shack. They were still there and still wanted in. He would have to come up with some way to deal with them. The things knew they were inside, he supposed they could smell them or something but they just kind of swayed back and forth. They didn’t go into a rage unless people were visible and then they went nuts.
Cody wasn’t from Putnam, they had lived a few miles out, but he was certain that he recognized some of the shambling monsters from his trips into town. One looked like the girl from the pizza place and he was pretty sure the old man in the mechanics clothes was the guy that changed the oil in his mom’s car. It was hard to tell, most of his face was gone but the gray hair looked familiar. They liked to bunch together, he noticed. Every time one came shuffling down the road, it would hear the crowd and come join them. They would have to figure out an easy way to kill them off. He didn’t want the horde to keep getting bigger and bigger. If it got to be in the thousands, they might spread out to the weaker chain link parts of the fence and be able to tear it down.
15
Cody
The days passed. They fell into a routine. No one came to rescue them and they knew no one would. They stopped sneaking glances to the parking lot every chance they had. They stopped straining their ears listening for a convoy of soldiers come to help. They were on their own. Their parents were gone. Their friends and family had all fallen before the unrelenting tide of undead. Some adjusted quicker than others. They all shed their tears in private or with faces buried in animal fur, breaking down while stoking their chosen companions. Cody, too, while he spent an afternoon with Otis, trying to teach the bear to grab fish out of the water. He let it all out and the big Kodiak took it all in then licked his salty tears with a rough tongue. He tried to be strong, not show any weakness around the others. He was the oldest and they were counting on him. Looking at him as a leader and not a boy in the shadow of manhood, just as lost and confused as they were. He finally stopped his sniffing and feeling sorry for himself, sighed and leaned back into Otis’s massive frame as they reclined near his pool. The afternoon sun felt good on his face, but the brisk fall wind prickled at his skin. It was already October, getting colder day by day and the only jackets they had were blankets from the gift shop with holes cut in them to make ponchos. He readjusted his so it covered his arms and whiled away the rest of the afternoon enjoying Otis’ warmth and musky bear smell.
True to Murray’s prediction, they
had lost power on the third day. That was okay. It was enough time to get everything any one could think of downloaded. The lights had flickered once and darkness enveloped them. The twins were ready with the candles and dinner continued but there was a hush to the conversation. They knew the power would never be coming back on.
Now, almost two weeks in, they were still eating like kings with hamburgers and hotdogs for every meal. Today was the last meat meal, though. The genny was out of fuel and the stuff in cold storage was gone. They gave smaller portions to the animals and tried to teach them to hunt but they had used the last of the meat this morning. They were saving the canned chili, usually used for the Coney’s, because it wouldn’t go bad. Tobias and Annalise had gathered all the junk food in the shops, smashed out the glass in the vending machines and had boxes of chips and candy bars but they couldn’t live on that. They needed nourishment. Real food. The chickens in the petting zoo gave eggs every day but it wasn’t enough to feed eight rapidly growing children. The cow gave them plenty of milk and Murray said you could make butter out of it by skimming the cream. The twins were eager to try it and had started a list of things they needed when the group went into town. A butter churn from an antiques store was added to it. The pair knew their way around a kitchen and had taken over the cooking duties. For a brief couple of months, they had decided they were going to be world famous celebrity chefs and had wreaked havoc in their parent’s kitchen. Between the cooking shows and the recipe books, they had learned a lot and gotten pretty good before they lost interest.
Cody had been formulating a supply run plan. There was a seldom used access gate on the back of the property that would put them a couple of miles outside Putnam. Otis and he had checked it out and found no undead hanging around. The crowd at the front gate had swelled to nearly a hundred. They just milled about in the parking lot until one of the kids captured their attention then they renewed their assault on the gates. He wondered how many it would take to overcome their defenses. That was something he didn’t want to find out. They would have to deal with them sooner or later, but they were weaponless. Murray assured them that a bullet through the brain would shut them down permanently, but there were no bullets. There were no guns to fire them. All they had were pitchforks and shovels. Cattle prods and tranquilizer guns. There were a few kitchen knives but nothing that would slow down the screaming undead if they shoved a section of fence over. They had tried a few different things against them but so far, they had avoided the whole problem. They couldn’t keep doing that, though. They needed to come up with a solution. Harper had jabbed one of them with a tranq stick but it had no effect other than increasing the attack on the wrought iron bars. The cattle prod made them dance but that was about it and it only worked on one at a time.
Each of them had been spending their days tending and befriending the animals, teaching their companions to hunt or at least eat fresh killed meat with the fur still on it. They had learned how to rig snares from one of the books and were introducing the animals to freshly killed rabbits with the blood still hot. They had let most of them out to roam free but many of them came back to their pens every night and Millie never wandered far.
The golf carts were dying. The short days and the weak sun would barely charge them enough for ten or fifteen minutes of power before they came to a stop. Murray extended the solar panel cables and spliced them all together so they directed their energy into one battery. It was enough to keep a cart and their phones fully charged. They pulled the invertor from the generator, hooked it to the oversized battery for 110 power. It gave him juice to run the computer but laptops and external hard drives were on his list of things to get from town. He wanted backups of backups.
There were plenty of downed trees, branches and brush inside the fences and Donny designed a crude harness to hook up to Teddy. With only a little coaxing, he was dragging whole logs out of the woods and up close to the work areas. The old buffalo seemed to enjoy the work and certainly the attention he got. The apples Vanessa found on one of her trips to the edges of the park helped with his motivation, too. With each of them taking an hour long turn each day with the axe, they had quickly amassed a couple of cords of firewood to keep them warm all winter. They scraped out a big firepit a good distance from the main house and got in the habit of having a campfire every night with the brush they trimmed off the logs.
Swan and the wolves had become inseparable. They shadowed her and were never far away. She would hurry through her chores of cleaning the barn stalls or spending an hour chopping wood but when they were finished, she’d run with her wolves. Her second family. They would play and hunt and chase the antelope but they never caught anything. Even the rabbits eluded them as they darted this way and that then finally disappeared down a hole. Sometimes they curled up together in the tall grass and slept, her between them, warm and protected. She was filled with delight when Cody told her that the swell in Lucy’s belly was babies. There would be wolf cubs soon.
Vanessa and Ziggy prowled the vast acreage of the park searching for edible berries and nuts, using some of the books Murray had put on her phone. The Ostrich towered over the ten-year-old, nearly double her height at a little over eight feet. Vanessa led the giant bird with a leash for the first week or so but the more time they spent together, the less time Ziggy wanted to spend apart from her. Cody thought the old mother bird had come to consider Vanessa as the child she never had. As the only one of her species in the park. She may have been lonely and not even realized it. The two became inseparable and Murray helped her rig up a saddle. Ziggy hardly felt the girls sixty pounds on her back and with her able to run thirty miles an hour, they could reach the far corners of the park faster than anyone else. She was protective, too. Her sharp eyes were constantly on the lookout for anything that would harm her or her chick. One evening, eating their last burgers around the campfire, Vanessa told them how Ziggy had defended her from a strange attack. They had been at the blackberry patch along the fence near the road. An opossum had come at her through a hole burrowed under it.
“I was gathering berries and Ziggy was hunting for lizards or something.” Vanessa said. “and that creepy little thing tried to bite me. Not just once, it acted like it was hungry and I was the main course. It was savage! I screamed and started to run but she was there almost instantly.”
She stroked the bird’s neck as it was nestled beside her.
“Didn’t you girl? You slashed that thing but good.”
The four-inch claws on Ziggy’s feet had eviscerated it, nearly cut it in half.
“But why would it attack you?” Murray asked. “They don’t eat people, they eat road kill and rummage through trash. They were bad at our house. My dad had to make a cage to keep them out of our garbage cans.”
“Not much road kill any more. Or trash.” Swan said. “You think it had rabies?”
“I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it. It was just weird, that’s all. I was proud of Ziggy for killing it.”
“Were there any zombies by the fence?” Tobias asked.
Vanessa shook her head. “Not really. There was one in the ditch but it was all busted up and most of it was gone. It could barely move.”
The twins exchanged a look and nodded to each other.
“What?” Cody asked. “What are you two not telling us?”
“We noticed it a couple of days ago.” Annalise said. “The coyotes and possums and vultures are eating the undead. We were on the roof of the aid station, watching the ones at the front gate and trying to figure out a way to kill them. If you’re quiet, they don’t notice you. They never look up.”
“That’s gross.” Harper said. “But maybe that will solve the problem. Maybe that’s nature’s way of getting rid of them.”
“Maybe.” Cody said. “But what if it’s contagious? What if the animals are turning into them? What if that possum was the first and the rest of them come after us?”
Nobody had any answers for that and all they
could do was hope it was an anomaly, just a crazy possum.
“Maybe you got too close to its nest and it was trying to protect its babies.” Murray said. “Has anyone else seen any of the others acting aggressively?”
No one had, the only weird thing was the animals that usually ate road kill were now eating the zombies.
“Same thing only different.” Cody finally said. “Dead and rotting is dead and rotting, right?”
“We’ll just have to keep a close eye on them.” Swan said, an arm around each of the wolves. “Maybe the Savage Ones will be content to eat the undead. Stinky meat is what their used to, right?” They shouldn’t bother us, we’re not dead.”
Most of the scavenger animals were normally nocturnal and avoided humans, but they’d taken to feeding at all times of the day. They paid no mind to the living, gorging themselves on the abundance of zombies. They ignored each other, too. Some were natural enemies but with more food than they could ever eat that stood still and let them feed, they left each other alone. The coyote didn’t need to try to kill a raccoon for dinner. Dinner was standing at the front gate. After a few bites, dinner would fall to the ground and they could tear into the soft and squishy parts.
No one had seen the hyenas since they fled the zoo and they had mostly forgotten about them. Out of sight, out of mind.
Donny and Yewan were at the fire every night, listening and watching, but he wasn’t sleeping in the house anymore. He preferred to bed down in the hayloft with blankets and the panther for company and warmth.
The Feral Children [A Zombie Road Tale] Box Set | Books 1-3 Page 9