by Gibb, Lew
Brent raised his hand immediately with a big smile. Cindy and Andy stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds before the two of them looked back at her and nodded. AJ didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. The dog was going with her, no matter what.
“By the way,” Clay said, “I wouldn’t bet on Gary in a rematch.”
“Now that’s a happy thought,” Rachel laughed. “I’d love another shot at that weasel.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Looking down at Fifteenth Street from the balcony of his corner unit, Jerry thought again about where Rachel might be. The two of them used to eat dinner on the balcony most nights in the summer as well as have coffee out here in the mornings. The dogs were in their usual spots with their heads on the railing. They loved staring down at passing cars and pedestrians. Now there wasn’t much to see. The occasional zombie shambled by, moving at a slow walk and focused on nothing more than carrying on in a straight line. As long as Jerry and the dogs kept quiet, the zombies wouldn’t look up, and there wouldn’t be a problem.
With his dogs by his side and sitting on his own balcony, Jerry felt Rachel’s absence even more deeply. There was no evidence she had been home. Tina would have seen her. So where was she, and why hadn’t she made it home yet?
“I think water is the most important thing for us to worry about,” Alberto said. He was seated next to Jerry in Rachel’s usual spot. “Especially since you have so many of those MREs.”
“Ha!” Jerry laughed, a quick bark that caused Mandy to lift her head and look at him. “Rachel gave me such a hard time about those.”
“It does seem rather odd.” Alberto scratched Kodi’s back as the big dog leaned against his chair. The dog was a master of the doleful stare, like he had never been patted in his life. “Why would you buy so many of those?”
Jerry shrugged. “I got a good price.” When Alberto raised his eyebrows, Jerry tried to defend himself. “I figured I could use them for camping if things didn’t turn out the way I thought they would.”
“You would have been camping till you were in your eighties,” Alberto laughed.
Jerry shrugged. “It’s only three hundred. Minus the ones I put in Rachel’s survival kit.”
“Wait,” Holly poked her head out the door. “You made a survival kit for Rachel?” She stepped out onto the balcony and gave Mandy a pat. “What was in it?”
Jerry explained about the gear he had put together for Rachel, his hope that she was still alive, and his fear that she hadn’t been wearing her jacket as he had asked her to. Holly got a faraway look in her eyes when he told them about the note with the chocolate bar.
Maria arrived after putting the children to bed in the spare bedroom. She eased into Alberto’s lap and wrapped an arm around his neck. “What are you talking about out here?”
“Water and MREs,” Jerry said.
“And what a romantic fool Jerry is,” Holly added.
Holly explained the MRE’s and Jerry’s gift. The two of them looked at him with undisguised mirth and discussed the merits of MRE’s as romantic tokens. Jerry couldn’t get them back onto the subject of water.
“Did you hear those last zombies?” Alberto said when the mirth seemed to have run its course.
“That was so creepy,” Holly said. “It almost sounded like words.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “I don’t know what that means. Could they still be human?”
Holly said, “They can say please and thank you, but I’m still not going to let them eat me.”
“Speaking of water and food,” Maria said, “how long are we staying here?”
“Jerry’s not going anywhere till Rachel gets here,” Holly said.
Jerry appreciated her being positive. He wasn’t sure his own optimism was going to make it. He had been so sure she would beat him home, especially with all the detours they had been forced to take. “She might have gone to the sanctuary if she was closer to it when everything went down.”
“There is probably enough bottled water in this building to last weeks,” Alberto said. “You Americans are so fixated on hydration and drinking pure water, you pay for something you can get for free out of the tap.”
“Not me,” Holly said. “I did a report on it in ninth grade. Did you know it takes three times more water to make the bottle than it does to fill it?”
“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that anymore,” Jerry said.
“I wonder what kind of food people have,” Maria said. “If we can find enough food and water in this building, there isn’t really any reason to leave right away.”
“Especially since this place is practically a zombie fortress already,” Holly said.
“I know,” Jerry nodded. “Like I said, there’s no way for a zombie to get in here without a key.”
“Unless, of course,” Alberto said, “they are already here.”
They moved inside, both to include Zach, Tina, and Tracy in the conversation and because the night had turned cold, reminding Jerry that winter was coming, and they would have to figure out what to do about heat.
“You know,” Zach said, “if we moved cars across the street between your building and the one across the street, it would probably keep the zombies heading down the street instead of coming into the courtyard.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “And since the street dead ends into the creek, we have a natural wall at that end, too.”
“Why is that?” Alberto asked.
“I think it has something to do with flood mitigation. Anyway, there’s only a ramp that goes down to the path along the creek. If we barricade that, this little block will be completely inaccessible to zombies.”
“That would be a nice little compound,” Zach said.
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourselves,” Tracy said, glaring at Zach. “What about the zombies already in the building?”
Jerry couldn’t believe there were so many things to think about. It seemed like as soon as he had a thought about something, another more important problem came up—like the possibility of zombies in the building. Holly seconded Tracy’s wish to make clearing the building of zombies a priority.
“I can barely stand it knowing those things are in here with us,” Tracy said. “What if one of them beaks through a wall and gets in here?”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” Zach said.
“Okay, mister soldier man, how ’bout you sleep against the wall over there so when they come through, they get you instead of me? By the time they finish with all you got going on, I’ll be in the next county.”
Zach looked truly hurt. In spite of his earlier joking, the guy seemed sensitive about his weight. Even though Zach had apologized several times and seemed truly horrified with the way the army had been rounding people up, Tracy hadn’t forgiven him for his part in her incarceration.
Tina spoke up. “Why don’t you sleep in my place, Tracy? It’s on the corner with the stairwell on one side and Jerry’s place on the other. No zombie neighbors.” She said the last bit with a smile.
Zach tried to save face by volunteering to sleep in Jerry’s spare bedroom, which had a common wall with the unit next door. Maria looked concerned about the possibility of her kids being so close to possible zombie abode until Jerry explained the way the units were constructed with two layers of extra thick drywall for sound mitigation.
“By the time anyone manages to break through all that,” he said, “you can come get us, and we’ll be waiting for them with our weapons.”
They decided to make a sweep of the floor in the morning to flush out any zombies and search for bottled water and food. Then they could decide about the rest of the building. The group was exhausted, and even though there were candles, Jerry didn’t want to advertise their presence to “marauders,” as Rachel called them, or zombies.
As he lay in his own bed with Kodi and Mandy lying on either side, he missed Rachel more than ever. Since he worked twenty-four-hour and forty-eig
ht hour shifts, they had spent more than their share of nights apart, but it seemed different now. He was trying to believe she could survive, especially if she had listened to him and kept her survival kit close. The thing he couldn’t get out of his head was the conversation about her not wanting to survive. In spite of what he had told her, he wasn’t at all sure of the biological imperative to survive. On top of all this, there were people out there like Zebulan Picke who were ready to take advantage of the situation.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
“Andy, how bad is your leg?” Rachel asked. “Before we can go anywhere, we need to know what we’re dealing with.”
They’d just finished eating a meal put together by Cindy while the rest of them were deciding on a plan of action for the next day. When Cindy called them to come eat, Rachel had been surprised to find a table set with full place settings and a stir-fried dinner complete with spicy Szechuan sauce and moo shu pancakes. It turned out Cindy was an accomplished home chef.
When Rachel asked where all the food came from, Clay said he’d gotten it from houses in the area. “I scavenged around while we were waiting for Cindy.”
Rachel noticed the bloody axe leaning in the corner. “How’d that go? The scavenging, I mean.”
“Not too bad.” Clay winked. “One or two zombies.”
After dinner, Rachel decided she should take a look at Andy’s knee to get an idea how much he might slow them down. Maybe Jerry could do something to fix him when they got there.
“I think the kneecap’s dislocated,” Andy said and tried to sit up a little straighter, wincing as he did so. “Plus, my other ankle might be broken. I can’t put any weight on it.”
Rachel sat down next to Andy and gently probed the side of his knee with her fingertips. An odd-shaped lump, like a squashed dumpling but hard, bulged on the outside of his knee. She hooked the fingers of her left hand around the edge of the kneecap lightly while pressing her thumb against the inside of his knee.
“What are you doing?” Andy asked in a worried voice.
“Checking for swelling.” Jerry had said one of the keys to this type of thing was that the patient had be as relaxed as possible. He’d told her about a doctor who made a practice of doing it more or less on the sly without giving the patient a chance to stiffen up. She hoped he was right. If she couldn’t fix it, Andy’s lack of mobility could be a serious problem.
She used her other hand to lift his lower leg, straightening it while applying more pressure with her fingers.
Andy stiffened and opened his mouth to scream.
Rachel applied more pressure with her fingertips and the kneecap snapped into place, just the way Jerry had described it, and Andy’s face relaxed.
“That’s amazing,” he said, smiling and sinking back into the cushions.
“What?” Cindy had been concentrating on reapplying her lipstick. Rachel was worried she might be in some sort of dissociative state.
“She just fixed my knee.” Andy flexed the leg a couple of times. “Before I knew it, she popped it back into place.” Andy met her eyes. “How did you know how to do that?”
Rachel shrugged. “My husband’s a paramedic. I guess I absorbed some stuff.” Jerry had told her so many stories of things that happened to his patients and how he’d dealt with them, she felt like she qualified as at least half a paramedic, especially since there wasn’t anyone else with any training around at the moment. Or any lawyers to sue her if she fucked things up. “What kind of painkillers do you have, and how many are left?”
Andy pulled a medicine bottle from his pocket. “Clay found a bottle of Percocet in the medicine cabinet, but they’re about gone.”
“Now that the dislocation’s reduced, your knee pain should be better. We still have to worry about the ankle.” Rachel prodded the outside of his other ankle. It was swollen, but he didn’t scream when she took hold of his foot and moved it gently through its range of motion. “Some ice packs wouldn’t hurt either.” With some ice and painkillers, Rachel hoped he would be okay to move in the morning. She was dying to get on the road and back to her husband.
Cindy seemed to come out of her trance. “There’s a pharmacy a few blocks from here.”
Everyone looked at her with surprise. Except for making dinner, the woman had been completely checked out. Maybe since this concerned her husband, she was able to focus.
“We could probably use some antibiotics, too,” Clay said. “You aren’t thinking of going by yourself, are you?”
“You volunteering?” Rachel’s eyes flicked to the bloody axe. It would be nice to have someone she could count on.
“I guess so.”
“You win. I’ll let you come risk your life with me.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Rachel twisted the knob and toed the back door. The smell of rotten meat and shit crawled out and slapped her in the face like a wet towel. She and Andy were next door to where Clay and Andy had been sheltering, but it felt a lot farther away from safety than one house over. They were looking for some protective clothing and maybe some weapons if they could stand the smell long enough to search the place.
“Smells like our freezer when it broke while we were on vacation,” she whispered, waving her hand in front of her face and pulling the back door farther open.
With the sun not quite over the horizon, the faint light of dawn illuminated the sky much more than the back porch and didn’t do anything for the opaque blackness five feet beyond the door. Every curtain and shade seemed to be closed. She wouldn’t have even considered entering the house while it was so dark, but Clay had cleared it when he was scavenging for painkillers and food for himself and Cindy’s husband, and they had a lot to do before they headed downtown. The way things were going, she wouldn’t be surprised if it took a week.
A zombie appeared in the yard next door. Rachel ducked and gripped her knife harder, but the guy was heading the other direction, oblivious to the tasty treats only thirty feet away. Clay crouched beside her. Heat radiated off of him. When the zombie disappeared around the corner, Clay nodded and ducked inside. Rachel slipped in behind him and eased the door closed. Now that she was inside, the smell felt like something she could physically touch, a transparent membrane wrapped around her face.
“Sorry,” Clay whispered when he noticed she’d pulled the collar of her t-shirt up over her nose. “If I’d known it would be this bad, I would have cleaned up after myself.” He clicked on his headlamp, and the source of the smell was illuminated. Six dead zombies were scattered around the large eat-in-kitchen’s center island. Overlapping reddish-black Rorschach blots covered the walls and cabinets.
“Were they having a party or what?” She wished Jerry had put some rubber gloves in her survival kit. Or a hazmat suit. How she hadn’t caught whatever virus was causing the mutants with all the bodily fluids she’d been drenched in was something she wished he was here to explain to her as well.
“The front door was open when I got here. I thought that was a good sign. But it must have attracted them. Before I knew it, they had me surrounded.”
Rachel imagined the place filled with six hungry zombies and shivered. “One or two zombies, huh? How many in the other houses?”
“Just three altogether, I think.”
“Seems like you’re not a bad guy to have around yourself.”
“If we run into any hot women, can you repeat that?” Clay said and smiled.
“Absolutely,” Rachel smiled. “I’ve heard the zombie apocalypse is a great place to meet people.”
“It hasn’t been that bad so far.” Clay winked and raised his eyebrows.
“Typical man,” Rachel said, pulling a face and moving farther into the house. She couldn’t help feeling flattered by Clay’s flirting. Then a part of her brain came up with the idea that he could make a decent surrogate father.
WTF?
Her hormones must have been putting maternal thoughts in her head. She wasn’t the kind of woman who was always ch
ecking guys out, even before she’d met Jerry. And here she was noticing how his muscles looked. Then she felt even more guilty about that.
Holy shit. Will you get a grip, woman?
What the hell was she doing even thinking about this crap when she was supposed to be looking out for attackers?
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” Clay said, turning from the front hall closet and holding up the leather bomber jacket he’d found while she was thinking about his body.
It was too small for him. He probably shopped in the big-and-tall section. But it might fit Andy. Rachel gritted her teeth and nodded while mentally screaming at herself to knock it the fuck off. She promised herself if she ever saw Linda Walsh again, the woman was going to get an earful for putting these thoughts in her head. Then she fled the area on the pretense of checking out the rest of the house.
Her mental temper tantrum seemed to do the trick, and she managed to complete the search of the house and the next one—where they found a Kevlar motorcycle jacket like Rachel’s with a pair of integrated gloves that fit Clay as well as a couple of nine millimeter pistols—without her asking the guy to marry her and adopt her child.
Once they were both geared up, and with her hormones on the back burner and dialed down to simmer, they were ready to make their way to the pharmacy on the main street just four blocks away.
It turned out to be just where Cindy had said it would be.
“I can’t believe we found it without Google,” Rachel whispered when they stopped in front of the full-length glass doors.
“I can’t believe the doors are locked,” Clay said, testing the handle. He jammed the blade of his axe between them, then grunted and cursed under his breath while levering the blade with the handle for almost a minute before he gave up and stepped back, breathing hard.
Rachel kept scanning the area. She couldn’t see any threats, but the back of her neck tingled like crazy. Standing alone in the middle of town with everything so empty made her feel like an exhibit in a museum of the apocalypse. She could imagine the little plaque that would be stuck to the glass fronting the diorama: Homo-delicious female.